Thanks to a tremendous amount of work by the staff at the Asmark Institute, a Process Safety Management compliance program is now available to help you comply with this new OSHA requirement.  Last week, OSHA announced they would be extending the compliance date for PSM at ag retail ammonia facilities from January 22, 2016 to July 22, 2016.  While this six month extension is welcome, it will still be extremely challenging given the complexity of this program.  

Please mark your calendar for January 21, 2016--that is the date IFCA will be offering the first PSM training class to our members, on the last day of our convention in Peoria. At this session we will show you how to utilize the Asmark compliance tools to prepare you for PSM compliance as well as upgrading your USEPA Risk Management Program to Program Level 3.  Although USEPA has not yet said when they expect ammonia facilities to file a Program Level 3 plan, that announcement may coincide with the new OSHA compliance date of July 22, 2016 so we need to get ready.  If you want to preview the Asmark PSM and RMP compliance tools, go to www.asmark.org and click on the yellow and red PSM icon on their homepage.  If you are an Asmark client, you can enter your password, or if you registered with Responsible Ag, you can enter your RA password.  All others can use the public access portal, which shows all the documents but does not save any of your information for future use.  Asmark clients and those registered in Responsible Ag can use the site to save all of their facility information, and return to the site to pick up where you left off as you build your PSM and RMP plans. PSM is definitely not something you will be able to do in one sitting.  

 

IFCA will do all we can to assist our members with the PSM requirement and we are extremely fortunate to have the tools that Asmark has provided to the retail industry.  PSM is a challenging regulation but it is not impossible and in the training class we will cut through the jargon to make it as easy to understand as possible.  If you have anhydrous ammonia, you will be required to register a Program Level 3 RMP with USEPA, and USEPA will likely share their list of RMP facilities with OSHA for audits and compliance purposes.  We recommend you take a look at the Asmark tools to get a feel for the extent of the documentation that will be required.  All the forms are under the RMP section of the PSM/RMP screen, but they correlate to the PSM requirements since many of the requirements are similar.  While January 21, 2016 is our first scheduled class, we will offer additional courses as well but it will be difficult if you wait until spring or summer to get started.  If you have questions, please contact IFCA.