Dealing with chemicals: it's everybody's job.

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act creates a new relationship among government at all levels, business and community leaders, environmental and other public-interest organizations, and individual citizens. For the first time, the law makes citizens full partners in preparing for emergencies and managing chemical risks. Each of these groups and individuals has an important role in making the program work:

Local communities and states have the basic responsibility for understanding risks posed by chemicals at the local level, for managing those risks, for reducing those risks, and for dealing with emergencies. By developing emergency planning and chemical risk management at the levels of government closest to the community, the law helps to ensure the broadest possible public representation in the decision-making process.

Citizens, health professionals, public-interest and labor organizations, the media, and others are working with government and industry to use the information for planning and response at the community level. The new law gives everyone involved access to more of the facts they need to determine what chemicals mean to the public health and safety.

Industry is responsible for operating as safely as possible using the most appropriate techniques and technologies; for gathering information on the chemicals it uses, stores, and releases into the environment and providing it to government agencies and local communities; and for helping set up procedures to handle chemical emergencies. Beyond meeting the letter of the law, some industry groups and individual companies are reaching out to their communities by explaining the health hazards involved in using chemicals, by opening communication channels with community groups, and by considering changes in their practices to reduce any potential risks to human health or the environment.

The federal government is responsible for providing national leadership and assistance to states and communities so they will have the tools and expertise they need to receive, assimilate, and analyze all Title III data, and to take appropriate measures in accidental risk and emissions reduction at the local level. EPA is also working to ensure that industry complies with the law's requirements; the public has access to information on annual toxic chemical releases; and the information is used in various EPA programs to protect the nation's air, water, and soil from pollution. EPA is also working with industry to encourage voluntary reductions in the use and release of hazardous chemicals wherever possible.

How the Law Works

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act contains four major provisions:

Planning for chemical emergencies.

Emergency notification of chemical accidents and releases.

Reporting of hazardous chemical inventories.

Toxic chemical release reporting.

The law also deals with trade secrets, disclosure of information to health professionals, public access to information gathered under the law, and other topics. The four major elements are described in this section. (The main provisions of the law are also outlined in Highlights of the Law, and It's in the Federal Register.)

Emergency Planning

The emergency planning section of the law is designed to help your community prepare for and respond to emergencies involving hazardous substances. Every community in the United States must be part of a comprehensive plan.

The governor of your state must appoint a State Emergency Response Commission (SERC). The governor can choose to name one or more existing state agencies, such as the environmental, emergency, health, transportation, commerce, and other relevant agencies, as the SERC. Members of trade associations, public- interest organizations, and others with experience in emergency planning may also be included on the SERC.

Each SERC in turn has divided its state into local emergency planning districts, and must appoint a Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) for each district. These committees should be broadly representative of their communities. They must include:

* Representatives of elected state and local officials.

* Law enforcement officials, civil defense workers, and firefighters.

* First aid, health, hospital, environmental, and transportation workers.

* Representatives of community groups and the news media.

* Owners and operators of industrial plants and other users of chemicals, such as hospitals, farms, small businesses, etc.

Around the country, LEPCs have been getting organized, and thousands of people, both volunteers and professionals, are participating in this program.

Your LEPC's first jobs are to get organized, receive information, analyze hazards, and proceed to develop a plan to prepare for and respond to chemical emergencies in your district. The initial plan must be completed by October 17, 1988 and must be exercised, reviewed annually, and updated. It should be based on the chemical information reported to the LEPC by local industries and public and other facilities with chemicals. This information enables the LEPC to conduct a community hazard analysis, identifying tapes and location of chemical hazards, vulnerable areas and populations, and the risk of accidents and their effects on the community.

Once the hazards have been analyzed, the LEPC develops a local emergency response plan. The plan lays out potential local hazards, response capabilities, and procedures to follow in an emergency. The planning process may identify opportunities for reducing risks by reducing chemical inventories.

The list of 366 "extremely hazardous substances" identified by EPA as having immediate health effects and hazardous properties may serve as a focus for emergency planning, but plans should address all hazardous materials in the community that present risks to public health and safety. These substances are found in some widely used insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, preservatives, photographic chemicals, and solvents as well as in wastewater treatment and drinking water treatment processes.

The list of extremely hazardous substances includes a "threshold planning quantity" for each substance. If this amount or more of the chemical is present at any manufacturing plant, warehouse, hospital, farm, small business, or other facility, the owner or operator must notify both your state emergency response commission and your local emergency planning coordinator. This lets the planners know what hazardous chemicals are being used and stored in your community.

The facility's owner or operator must also name an employee as "facility coordinator," and that person must participate in your district's planning process.

Facility owners or operators who violate the reporting provisions of this section of the law are subject to civil penalties of up to $25,000 a day for each day a violation continues.

Your LEPC will appoint an information coordinator who will receive and process information as it is submitted to the committee and make it available to the public.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Title III is that an emergency response plan must address these unique characteristics in your community - a fill-in-the-blanks plan will not do this. Since membership on the LEPC is broad-based, your LEPC should be familiar with your community h should know about the capacities of local hospitals, and about the location of schools nursing homes and other special considerations in the community. It should consider all these factors in developing the emergency response plan.

The LEPC must let you and your neighbors know about the plan by publishing notices and scheduling public meetings, where you will have a chance to comment on the LEPC's activities. Your LEPC must also conduct emergency drills to make sure the plan will work if an accident occurs.

The plan due in October 1988 is the beginning, not the end, of your LEPC's responsibilities. The LEPC must review the plan annually, and as new information becomes available, your district's plan will have to be updated. The LEPC will be a focal point in the community for information on hazardous chemicals. LEPC meetings will also provide a forum for discussions of how your community should address hazardous situations identified during the planning process.

The SERCs also have continuing responsibilities: they must supervise and coordinate the activities of LEPCs, and they and LEPCs must establish procedures for receiving and processing public requests for information collected under other sections of the new law. They must also review local emergency plans annually to make sure of such things as coordination across the state.

If your SERC and LEPC do their jobs well under this new planning process, your community should be much better prepared to deal with chemical accidents than in the past, and will be better able to make decisions about the presence of chemicals in the community.

Required Elements of a Local Emergency Plan

An emergency plan must:

* Use the information provided by industry to identify the facilities and transportation routes where hazardous substances are present.

* Establish emergency response procedures, including evacuation plans, for dealing with accidental chemical releases.

* Set up notification procedures for those who will respond to an emergency.

* Establish methods for determining the occurrence and severity of a release and the areas and populations likely to be affected.

* Establish ways to notify the public of a release.

* Identify the emergency equipment available in the community, including equipment at facilities.

* Contain a program and schedules for training local emergency response and medical workers to respond to chemical emergencies.

* Establish methods and schedules for conducting "exercises" (simulations) to test elements of the emergency response plan.

* Designate a community coordinator and facility coordinators to carry out the plan.

Emergency Release Notification

If there's a chemical accident at a commercial, municipal, or other facility or on a transportation route in your community, and if the accident results in the release of any one of a large number of hazardous substances, you have a right to know about it.

Under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know law, a facility must immediately notify the community and the state - the LEPC and the SERC of the release of more than a predetermined amount of one of these chemicals. If the release results from a transportation accident, the transporter can dial 911 or the local telephone operator to report it.

Chemicals covered by this section include not only the 366 "extremely hazardous substances" mentioned in the preceding section, but also more than 700 hazardous substances subject to the emergency notification requirements of the Superfund hazardous waste cleanup law (some chemicals are on both lists). Superfund requires notification of releases to the National Response Center (NRC), which alerts federal responders.

For some of the most hazardous and toxic chemicals on these lists, releases of more than one pound must be reported. For others, the reporting quantities range from ten to 10,000 pounds. EPA is combining these two lists of chemicals into a single master list for accidental release reporting so that releases will be reported to federal, state, and local levels.

Immediate notification must include:

The name of the chemical.

The location of the release.

Whether the chemical is on the "extremely hazardous" list.

How much of the substance has been released.

The time and duration of the incident.

Whether the chemical was released into the air, water, or soil, or some combination of the three.

Known or anticipated health risks and necessary medical attention.

Proper precautions, such as evacuation.

A contact person at the facility.

The notification will activate emergency plans. Information on emergency releases will also be considered in the SERC and LEPC planning process.

The law also requires follow-up reporting. As soon as practicable after the release, the facility coordinator must submit a written report to both the LEPC and the SERC. The follow-up report must update the original notification and provide additional information on response actions taken, known or anticipated health risks, and, if appropriate, advice regarding any medical care needed by exposure victims.

Any person who fails to notify the authorities of a release or to submit a follow-up emergency report is subject to civil penalties of up to $25,000 a day for each day of non-compliance. Repeat offenders can be fined up to $75,000 a day.

In addition, criminal penalties may be imposed on any person who knowingly and willfully fails to provide notice; criminal violators face fines of up to $25,000 or prison sentences of up to two years. Repeat criminal offenders can be fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for as long as five years.

Hazardous Chemical Reporting

Information about accidental chemical releases is only the beginning of your "right to know" about hazardous substances. You also have a right to information about the amounts, location and potential effects of hazardous chemicals being used or stored in designated quantities in your community.

Facilities must report this information to your LEPC, your SERC, and your local fire departments. The LEPC and SERC, in turn, must make the information available to the public.

Never before has such comprehensive information on chemicals been so accessible to the public. All companies, large or small, manufacturing or non-manufacturing, are potentially subject to this requirement.

This information provides a tool which can be used to lower chemical hazards in the community by reducing chemical inventories. The reports are also essential for LEPCs and emergency response workers, providing the raw material for the emergency planning process discussed earlier. Fire departments and public health officials will use the information to plan for and respond to emergencies.

Facilities must report on the hazardous chemicals they use and store in two different ways. The first is through material safety data sheets (MSDSs), which contain information on a chemical's physical properties and health effects. Under federal laws administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), companies are required to keep MSDSs on file for all hazardous chemicals used in the workplace. They must also make these sheets available to their employees, so workers will know about the chemical hazards they are exposed to and can take necessary precautions in handling the substances.

Under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, facilities must submit either actual copies of the MSDSs, or lists of MSDS chemicals that are present at the facilities in excess of certain amounts. These must be sent to the LEPC, the SERC, and the local fire department. This reporting requirement has been in effect since October 17,1987.

The reporting for this part of Title III is based not on any list of specific chemicals, but on a definition of "hazardous chemical" under OSHAJs requirements - essentially any chemical that poses physical or health hazards. As many as 500,000 products can fit the definition and thus, if present in amounts above the thresholds, must be reported. Information below the threshold must be provided by the facility when it is requested by the LEPCs.

When the Act was passed in 1986, OSHKs regulations applied only to manufacturers. OSHA has since expanded its requirements to include most facilities where workers are exposed to hazardous chemicals, and the community reporting requirements are tied to OSHA's by law. Before the change, about 350,000 facilities were covered by OSHA; now, an estimated 4.5 million facilities are covered.

The second way that companies must report on hazardous chemicals is by submitting annual inventories of these same hazardous chemicals to the same three organizations - the LEPC, the SERC, and the local fire department. The first annual inventory report was due on March 1. 1988.

The law includes a "two-tier" approach for annual inventory reporting. Under Tier 1, a facility must report the amounts and general location of chemicals in certain hazard categories. For example, a Tier I report might say that a facility stores 10,000 pounds of substances that cause chronic health effects.

A Tier II report contains basically the same information, but it must name the specific chemical. A Tier II report might say that the facility has 500 pounds of benzene, and it would indicate the physical and health hazards associated with benzene.

Congress gave companies the flexibility to choose whether to file Tier I or Tier II forms, unless state or local laws require Tier II reporting. EPA believes that Tier II reports provide emergency planners and communities with more useful information, and is encouraging facilities to submit Tier II forms. Many companies have voluntarily provided Tier II reports.

You can gain access to MSDS and annual inventory reports by contacting your SERC or LEPC. While the information is available to the public, companies can ask that the locations of specific chemicals within the facility be kept confidential. This means that SERCs, LEPCs, and local fire departments can use the location information but not disclose it to the public.

Violators of the hazardous chemical reporting provisions are subject to the following penalties: for failing to submit MSDSs or lists of MSDS chemicals, civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day for each violation; for non-compliance with the annual inventory requirements, $25,000 per violation.