United States Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

OSHA doesn't necessarily have a standard, but that doesn't mean we don't care about this space.

So OSHA playing in the space that it maybe hasn't necessarily played in or doesn't have a regulatory maybe oversight of, I'm having some great early conversations with our friends at the DOT and PHMSA to talk about how we can coordinate Because if you walk around here, you'll see a lot of folks that are really concentrated on fleet safety and driving safety.

We want to play in that space as well.

Certainly the DOT and the FEMSA own it, but where can we help? So OSHA Cares is really from that framework is we do care about things, right? We care about everything that affects the American worker.

Even cylinders that appear empty can retain propane, creating fire and explosion hazards for garbage and recycling workers, and they can't really be recycled in a traditional fashion.

But Worthington Enterprises, one of the major manufacturers of disposable propane cylinders, challenged the law last year, and now the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the PHMSA, has sided with Worthington.

The agency says propane cylinders are already regulated under federal hazardous material transportation rules and determined that California can't effectively outlaw a cylinder design that federal regulations specifically authorized.

The agency also argued that allowing individual states to impose different cylinder design requirements would undermine the uniform national system for transporting hazardous materials.

And I've been here about a year.

And prior to joining INGA, I was actually at PHMSA.

All right.

So lots of background in pipeline safety.

And to kind of put more of an emphasis on why this is such a time crunch.

So, you know, over the last few years, new gas legislation, the mega rule's been released, right? Title 49, CFR 192, Section 473.

That's the interference current section of the PHMSA code.

The code says that when you detect an issue on your system, you need to quickly respond, start to study, and mitigate.

Yeah, so I'm Keith Coyle.

I am the Chief Counsel at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

That's PHMSA.

We regulate pipeline safety and the transportation of hazardous materials.

But the other side of that is when I get an alarm, what do I do? So I would say that given...

The things that are going on with PHMSA and their regulations, particularly if you look at the rupture mitigation valve rule and kind of the expectations they laid out that if you get an indication that you may have a leak, then you need to have the pipeline shut down within 30 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

That adds that there's a lot that goes into that.