This week OSHA expanded a two-year-old enforcement program aimed at preventing catastrophic release of highly hazardous chemicals—the type of headline-grabbing event that ruined thousands of lives in Bhopal in 1984 and was narrowly avoided in West Virginia in 2008. Originally targeted at just three regions (and optional for state-plan states in those regions), the National Emphasis Program for PSM Covered Chemical Facilities (aka “Chem NEP”) has now been expanded nationwide and requires all state-plan states to adopt their own version of the program. This is a good step toward addressing a serious problem.
In announcing the expansion of the NEP on Wednesday, OSHA chief David Michaels said that “far too many workers are injured and killed in preventable incidents at chemical facilities around the country,” and that inspections during the pilot period “found many of the same safety-related problems that were uncovered during [OSHA’s] NEP for the refinery industry, which is also covered by the PSM standard.” Those problems were most often issues with equipment and with operating procedures. Those sound like serious concerns, especially if the problems show up at similar incidence rates around the country as they did in the pilot NEP.
Chris Hamby, of the Center for Public Integrity, has pointed out a concern that’s not unique to this NEP, but is worth repeating: any facility that’s a part of the Voluntary Protection Program will get a pass on any programmed inspection that would fall under the NEP. That includes VPP sites where a total of 18 workers have died since 2000—hardly the “model workplaces” that ought to get such special treatment.
Full textA few weeks ago, Rena Steinzor used this space to highlight some questionable activity happening at EPA’s IRIS office and wonder, “ Is IRIS Next on the Hit List?” The good news last week was that EPA released a number of documents, including the controversial and long-awaited assessment of TCE, giving some reassurance that IRIS staff are still plugging away at their important work (see Jennifer Sass and Daniel Rosenberg over at Switchboard for more on the TCE news).
A new report from Inside EPA, available here, sheds more light on the state of IRIS, by which we now see that the chemical industry’s lobbying arm, the American Chemistry Council, has its cross-hairs trained directly on the IRIS program.
Maria Hegstad reports that ACC recently met with Cass Sunstein, Administrator of OIRA, and David Lane, assistant to President Obama and counselor to the President’s Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, to argue for elimination of several government programs designed to assess the risks posed by toxic chemicals. The programs that ACC has targeted include EPA’s IRIS program, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) housed at NIH, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and HHS’s Report on Carcinogens (ROC) program.
Full textShortly after my August 5th post criticizing their Data Quality Act complaint to EPA, the International Platinum Group Metals Association sent me a kindly-written response letter (Inside EPA recently reported on the letter). Accusing me of both missing the point of their complaint and brushing aside important scientific concerns to make a headline-grabbing call for “over-regulation,” IPA reiterated their concern that EPA’s draft IRIS assessment for halogenated platinum salts fails to meet DQA standards. Their letter is an eloquently-written piece of advocacy, but it provides no information to alter my analysis that their complaint falls squarely within the realm of “frivolous” claims that EPA has the discretion to decline to review.
To recap, both OMB’s government-wide guidelines and EPA’s own internal rules for dealing with DQA complaints (both Bush-era creations) allow the agency to decline to review “frivolous” complaints, such as those “for which a response would be duplicative.” As evidenced by the IRISTrack listing for the document at issue here and the express assurances of Paul Anastas to Rep. Ed Whitfield in a July 29 letter, IRIS staff are tantalizingly close to publishing a final draft of the platinum salts IRIS profile. When it is finalized, the IRIS profile will surely address IPA’s concerns, given that they have been voiced on multiple prior occasions during the IRIS assessment process by both IPA and members of EPA’s external peer review team (pdf). EPA should decline to review this redundant/duplicative/frivolous DQA complaint.
IPA claims I’m missing the point, arguing:
Full textThe goal is to fix the problem earlier rather than later, so that the proposed [inhalation reference concentration] no longer sits on so ephemeral a foundation when it goes for final review. And the timing and form of the remaining review process are themselves open to question. With no hard deadline for issuing the final report, the information reflecting the error is still out there, and as no rulemaking is involved, there are no standards governing the attention given to public comments on the draft.
On Monday, EPA announced its intention to revise the emergency planning rules for industrial facilities. The goal of the revisions is to give state and local emergency planning committees better information that they can use to prepare for chemical spills, explosions, and other disasters at industrial facilities. In the initial proposal released Monday, EPA disregards a request from first responders that the new rules demand more information about the total number of people likely to be on-site during an emergency situation. EPA is proposing that facilities simply report the number of full-time employees, rather than what first responders say would be a more useful estimate of the total number of people likely to be on-site, including contract workers and members of the public.
EPA’s emergency planning rules are based on congressional mandates found in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). EPCRA requires industrial facilities to report information about extremely hazardous substances that they store or use so that fire fighters and other first responders know what to expect when disaster strikes. EPA has developed simplified forms and a web-based system to facilitate easier compliance with the law and better access to information for response teams and emergency planners.
The statute’s history is a blue-green success story that underscores the inadequacy of one aspect of Monday’s proposal—a new data-point that would only count the number of full-time employees at a facility. In the late 1970s, unions in the United States undertook a major campaign centered on workers’ right to know about the hazards they faced in the workplace. By the early 1980s, their diverse efforts at individual workplaces and in several states prompted the development of a uniform federal standard, OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard. The key provisions of the “HazCom standard” require employers to provide their workers with Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for chemicals to which they may be exposed and mandate training to help workers use that information. The standard isn’t perfect, but it brought practical implementation of the right-to-know principle to the federal level, setting the stage for EPCRA. Shortly after OSHA instituted the HazCom standard, Congress began working on amendments to the Superfund law. The workers who did the dirty job of Superfund site remediation joined with environmentalists and others to fight for an expansion of the right-to-know principle to the communities surrounding cleanup sites and other industrial facilities.
Full textOn Monday, the International Platinum Group Metals Association submitted a Data Quality Act complaint (pdf) to EPA regarding a draft toxicological review of halogenated platinum salts and platinum compounds. This one ought to go straight to the agency’s recycling bin.
IPA, as the trade group calls itself, is complaining that the draft document, released by EPA’s IRIS office in 2009 for peer review and public comment, does not meet the standards of objectivity and utility required under the DQA and its implementing guidelines. In IPA’s view,
EPA’s exclusive reliance on [a] single and inappropriate study, as well as the proposed [reference concentration] derived based on that study, constitutes erroneous information, the dissemination of which -- even in “external review draft” form -- contravenes the [DQA].
I won’t go into the scientific debate here because it’s irrelevant to how EPA should handle the DQA complaint.
Under both OMB’s government-wide and EPA’s agency-specific (pdf) guidelines for handling DQA complaints, the trade association’s complaint is “frivolous” and the agency is well within its rights to decline to review it. The guidelines state that EPA need not review DQA complaints “for which a response would be duplicative.” Since the document that IPA is complaining about is a draft put out by the agency for public review and comment, responding through the DQA process would certainly be duplicative of the upcoming response from IRIS program staff. IRISTrack, the public list of the IRIS program’s schedule for completing ongoing work, shows that agency staff are addressing reviewers’ comments on the platinum salts document right now and will have a final version out by the end of September.
Full textOn Tuesday, EPA finalized important revisions to its Inventory Update Rule (IUR), which is the federal government’s primary means of finding out what chemicals are being produced or used, where they’re being produced and used, and in what quantities. The revisions close up some major loopholes created by the Bush administration and should give the agency more accurate data for its chemical management program, which GAO tagged in 2009 as being at “high risk” of becoming ineffective.
EPA made some important improvements to the rule, now dubbed the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) rule. Manufacturers will once again have to submit data every four years, instead of every five. When they do, they’ll have to submit data for each year since the last report, instead of just the data from the year in which the report is due. The generic threshold for having to report detailed information about downstream uses of a chemical will be shifted back to apply to any chemical produced at a site in volumes exceeding 25,000 pounds in a year. That closes a loophole created by the Bush administration, which required only basic chemical identification and simplified on-site production volumes for manufacturers who kept production volumes below 300,000 pounds during the reporting year. And to further ensure that we begin to develop a better picture of how chemicals are distributed in commerce, the standard for reporting information about downstream uses has been changed from the Bush standard of only that which is “readily obtainable” (which, by rule, absolved manufacturers from “extensive file searches”), to a better standard of “reasonably ascertainable.” Those changes and others will give EPA and the public a much better picture of how chemicals pervade our lives.
However, EPA missed an opportunity to use this new rule to really help out its sister agencies OSHA and NIOSH. In my blog post from last August, when EPA proposed the revisions that were finalized yesterday, I noted that, by EPA’s admission, the IUR/CDR data only enabled EPA to develop “qualitative exposure characterizations with relative ranking of low, medium, or high for characterizing potential exposures to various populations,” including workers. Those exposure characterizations are inadequate for supporting protective regulation. At the time, EPA asked the public to comment on whether the updated IUR should include additional data elements, such as worker tasks or occupational exposure monitoring, to improve risk management capabilities at EPA and other agencies.
Full textToday marks 90 days since the last milestone in the White House’s push toward improvements in federal agencies’ scientific integrity policies. Agencies that have made progress in this time ought to release their draft plans and open them to public comment.
From an outsider’s perspective, there hasn’t been much progress to evaluate recently. It’s something we’ve gotten used to—after an initial push, this administration has not presented much of a sense of urgency in its efforts to set up new scientific integrity policies.
A quick timeline: President Obama issued an Executive Order in March 2009 that proclaimed the importance of ensuring scientific integrity in the federal government and assigned the task of developing new administration policies to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Dr. John Holdren. In December 2010, Holdren issued a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies, providing them with guidance and minimum standards for the new scientific integrity policies and giving them 120 days to report to him on their progress. According to a May 5, 2011 blog post by OSTP Student Volunteer Mira Atanassova,
more than 30 executive branch departments, agencies, and offices submitted progress reports on the development of their respective scientific integrity policies. A handful went even further than required and provided draft or complete policies for review.
At that time, Holdren gave all agencies 90 days to submit draft policies.
Full textEPA announced Wednesday that staff from the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention are making good on a promise to give the public increased access to health and safety studies about the toxic chemicals that pervade our lives. I applaud EPA for their work. Until Congress reforms TSCA to free EPA’s hand in regulating toxic chemicals, we have to rely too much on an imperfect alternative system, where public interest groups use publicly available data to inform the public about risks and campaign for chemical limits at the state level (see, e.g., BPA). . Broad access to the health and safety studies that EPA has just released, along with the TSCA Inventory and Chemical Access Data Tool, ensures that public interest groups and consumer advocates will have plenty of evidence to back their campaigns.
EPA’s data release is part of an ongoing effort to reassess whether certain information, once claimed to be confidential business information by the company submitting it to the agency, still deserves the protections that go along with the CBI designation. Under various sections of TSCA, chemical companies must submit health and safety studies about their chemicals to EPA. For instance, under § 8(e), companies must submit any study "which reasonably supports the conclusion that [a] substance or mixture presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment." Skimming over EPA's list of recently released studies, it looks like many were 8(e) submissions.
The reason EPA is cleaning house, so to speak, is that, in many instances, companies would stamp data in the study or the company’s name or even the identity of the chemical as "CBI." So even though EPA dutifully put copies of 8(e) submissions on their website, the studies weren’t much use to outside researchers or advocates because they were missing key information. This week's release is a big step in the right direction.
Full textOSHA published a report (pdf) last week on its role in the federal government’s response to last year’s massive oil spill. Within days of the blowout aboard the Deepwater Horizon, OSHA officials were in Louisiana, working to ensure that the people involved in the response and cleanup had adequate protection from the myriad hazards they would face. The new report is mainly a list of accomplishments, not an introspective “lessons learned” self-evaluation that could have paved the way for policy changes that would improve the federal oil spill response system. Nevertheless, the document is worth the read because it provides a good sense of the difficulty OSHA faced in protecting a huge workforce from so many hazards, as part of an unprecedented government response.
The report covers a handful of areas where OSHA did most of its work: site visits, intervention, and technical support; chemical exposure assessment; personal protective equipment (PPE); training; guidance and publications; community outreach; injury and illness reporting; and efforts to support the Labor Department’s big-picture goals of hiring local and displaced workers.
The report’s sections on enforcement and training missed some key points that I would have liked to see the agency address. First, the report glosses over the issue of enforcement versus compliance assistance. Following the spill, OSHA chose to focus its staff’s efforts on maximizing site visits, at the expense of strong enforcement. The agency made the calculation that its limited staff in the Gulf region would be able to better protect workers by eschewing citations in favor of guidance and assistance to the employer (BP).
Full textEPA announced Wednesday that it is delaying the reporting period for its Inventory Update Reporting requirement. It's not good news.
EPA had announced its intention to revise (pdf) the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR) back in August of last year. The TSCA Inventory is the official list of chemicals in commerce, and the IUR is the regulation that requires companies to submit production and use data to EPA to ensure the Inventory accurately represents all of the chemicals out there. Determining the risks posed by chemicals in the environment is a matter of combining hazard information with exposure data. The TSCA Inventory, along the data in EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, provide answers to the “exposure” half of that equation.
EPA's proposal was a step forward, requiring more information reporting from chemical manufacturers, more frequent updates, less information hidden from the public by confidentiality, and other improvements.
EPA sent the rule to OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs back on January 20th. OIRA then hosted at least six meetings on the issue -- five with industry representatives and just one with environmental and public health groups. The chemical industry has been bombarding the administration and congress with fallacious arguments against the updated IUR (see this useful post by Richard Denison and Allison Tracy for a rundown and explanation. In one example, industry claims small businesses will be unduly burdened, when they are in fact largely exempted).
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