News

OSHA violated ag retailer exemption

A recent appeals court ruling found an Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation of retail fertilizer facilities violated the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

Daren Coppock, President of the Ag Retailers Association, tells Brownfield the ruling is an initial win for ag retailers and The Fertilizer Institute that led the appeal, and will save the industry a least $100 million in compliance upgrades.  “We approached OSHA early on right after West and said, ‘Look, you’ve got a standard in place for storage and handling of ammonium nitrate, clearly something went wrong at West Fertilizer, let’s take a look at what happened there and see if we can improve that standard so that we can avoid similar issues like this in the future.’”

OSHA’s Process Safety Management exemption for hazardous chemicals was in response to the explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas. Coppock says the OSHA standard did not go through the proper notification process for the regulation.  “That’s really the crux of the issue about how they made the decision incorrectly—rather than going through regular rulemaking and comment and notice procedures like the OSH Act requires them to do, they just reinterpreted a letter that they’d issued 22 years ago that people had been relying on for a long time.”  The change would have applied to any facility with more than 10,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia or 15,000 pounds of aqua ammonia.  However, Coppock says the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas involved ammonium nitrate, NOT anhydrous ammonia.

AUDIO: Interview with Daren Coppock