US safety board may issue new reporting rules

25 August 2008 22:48  [Source: ICIS news]

WASHINGTON (ICIS news)--US chemical safety officials soon will seek industry and public views on a possible new regulation that would require producers to furnish prompt and detailed accident information to federal investigators, an agency official said on Monday.

 

A spokeswoman for the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) said the board will issue by late September a request for public comment on a potential reporting obligation - even though the board itself does not think a separate chemical accident notification programme is necessary.

 

The board is being pressed to institute a chemical accident reporting regulation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the audit and investigative arm of Congress.

 

In a new report on the Chemical Safety Board’s operations, the GAO found fault with some of the board’s management policies and information gathering processes.

 

“CSB has not fully responded to [earlier] recommendations to publish a data-reporting regulation and improve the quality of its accident data,” the GAO report said.

 

The GAO also noted that the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments that established the CSB as an independent federal agency included “a statutory requirement to publish a regulation for receiving information from facilities on their chemical accidents”.

 

Despite that legal obligation, said the GAO, “the CSB has not issued the regulation, and [CSB] officials said they have no plans to do so”.

 

“Instead, the CSB relies primarily on the media, such as online newspapers and television, to learn about chemical accidents,” the GAO said in its report to congressional committees with responsibility for the safety board.

 

In response to the GAO criticism, the board said that “a reporting regulation is not needed for the narrow purpose of notifying the CSB of major accidents warranting the deployment of investigators”.  “We can and do easily learn what we need to know simply from monitoring the media” and reports from other federal agencies, the CSB added.

 

However, while the board opposes a reporting obligation for industry, it told GAO that it would at least publish a “request for information” in the Federal Register, inviting chemical industry, environmental and safety sector stakeholders to offer opinions on whether a CSB accident reporting requirement is needed.

 

That invitation to comment will be issued by late September, the CSB spokeswoman said.

 

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By: Joe Kamalick
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