Untitled Document

John Gannon, Bureau of National Affairs
“Ignorance of Safety Data Sheet Gaps Can Have Fatal Outcomes, Experts Say”

Reproduced with permission from Daily Report for Executives
No. 113, pp. C-1 - C-4
(June 12, 2002)

Job Safety
Ignorance of Safety Data Sheet Gaps Can Have Fatal Outcomes, Experts Say

Evidence from a variety of expert sources suggests that a large proportion of material safety data sheets--which are supposed to provide essential health and safety information about hazardous chemicals in order that workers can handle them safely--are dangerously inaccurate.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the information in the MSDSs can be trusted, but studies by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazardous Investigation Board and the Enviromental Protection Agency, and even a study funded by OSHA itself, undermine that assumption, experts told BNA.

Since the Chemical Safety Board began operations in 1998, it has investigated 11 industrial chemical accidents. In three of these cases, the board has recommended that the information in the data sheets for the chemicals involved in the accidents be corrected in order to decrease the likelihood of similar tragedies in the future.

In a report issued in August 2000, CSB concluded that the MSDS for the dye, Automate Yellow 96, was wrong on two counts. It listed the dye's National Fire Protection Association Reactivity Rating as zero (on a zero-to-four scale, with four being the most reactive), when it was actually one. Secondly, it listed the boiling point for Yellow 96 as 100 degrees when it in fact was about 330 degrees C.

In part because of the lack of accurate information about Yellow 96, the mixture in the kettle began to generate heat of its own and soon became uncontrollable. The operators stood by naively trying to cool the mixture at a time when they still had time to evacuate.

The pipe that the crew opened had been partially frozen, and the liquid that flowed out was highly flammable. Two workers died, and four more were injured by the resulting fire.

CSB investigators determined the liquid may have been ignited by a nearby heat lamp or space heater. Had the crew known they might be dealing with a highly flammable liquid, they could have taken proper precautions before opening the pipe, board investigators suggested.

The cover was fastened to the tank around its circumference with 44 bolts. As the technician removed the twenty-second bolt, the pressure from the gas inside the tank ripped off the cover and hot plastic shot from the tank.

In its recommendations, the board suggested that the company, now Solvay Advanced Polymers, revise the MSDS for Amodel to warn past and future customers of its hazardous properties.

In addition, Section 311 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act requires employers to maintain material safety data sheets for hazardous chemicals kept at their facilities.

The information contained in an MSDS is supposed to help workers handle chemicals appropriately. In the event of a facility emergency or disaster, MSDSs are supposed to assist firefighters, hazardous materials teams, and health care professionals to address and resolve the crisis. MSDSs also allow citizens to learn about the properties of the chemicals that are used and stored in their communities.

OSHA Downplays Problem

In response to written questions from BNA, a spokeswoman for OSHA said the agency "rarely" finds inaccurate MSDSs during facility inspections and is not considering any actions to increase MSDS reliability, such as issuing a hazard information bulletin, increasing inspections, or proposing new regulations.

In Appendix E to OSHA's hazard communication standard, the agency says that employers can "rely on the information received from ... suppliers. You have no independent duty to analyze the chemical or evaluate the hazards of it."

Yet a study of 150 MSDSs funded by OSHA and published in the American Industrial Hygiene Journal in February 1995 found plenty of room to improve: only 37 percent had accurate health effects data, 47 percent had accurate information about personal protective equipment and occupational exposure limits, and 76 percent had adequate first aid information.

OSHA has not granted BNA's requests to interview OSHA officials further on the MSDS issue, although efforts to schedule an interview are ongoing.

Fred Blosser, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said the institute has never studied MSDS accuracy or been asked to study the issue by any government agency, labor, or trade organization. "It is not something that has crossed our radar screen," Blosser said.

Morton was originally fined $7,000 by OSHA for failing to provide a place of employment free from hazards, and settled with the agency for $5,000.

Bethlehem Steel was assessed $9,875 by the Indiana Department of Labor in proposed penalties for having a catwalk without a standard railing on all sides, not keeping the catwalk stairs clear of obstructions, not using lockout/tagout devices, and having power supply switches that were not arranged to be locked in the off position. Bethlehem Steel is contesting the fines.

Department spokeswoman Diane Mack said that the steelmaker was not cited for an inaccurate MSDS because the accident occurred on a Friday night and investigators did not arrive until the following Monday morning. By then, the liquid in question had evaporated, she said.

"Our agency needs a certain level of documentation to support a citation," Mack said.

The chemical board, because it has no enforcement power, was able to obtain a sample of coke oven gas condensate from an area of the facility close to where the accident occurred, and infer that the actual condensate involved in the fire was essentially similar, Mack said.

OSHA cited BP Amoco for exposing employees to the release of hazardous energy, failing to properly install pressure relief devices, and not training employees properly on lockout/tagout procedures. It originally proposed fines of $141,000 and settled the case for $119,000.

A senior OSHA official familiar with the agency's investigation said that investigators did not seek to determine if the MSDS for Amodel was correct.

"Not being chemists, I don't think we looked into it that deeply," he said.

EPA Issues Alert

The issue of MSDS accuracy has crossed the radar of the Environmental Protection Agency. In a chemical safety alert issued in June 1999, "Use Multiple Data Sources for Safer Emergency Response," EPA cautioned emergency responders that the information in a single MSDS should not be trusted when planning a response to a facility emergency, such as a fire. The alert cited incidents in Arkansas and Lodi, N.J., in which firefighters and emergency responders depended on an MSDS to make a critical decision, and lost their lives as a result.

To illustrate the point, EPA obtained MSDSs for the insecticide azinphos methyl (CAS No. 86-50-0) from four different suppliers. The four documents offered conflicting views of the substance's flammability, incompatibilities, reactivity, and overall hazard ratings. One MSDS listed "high temperatures, oxidizers, alkaline substances" as incompatible with the insecticide; a second said "acids and bases" were incompatible; and a third cited "heat, moisture."

The alert also noted that "vagueness, technical jargon, understandability, product vs. process concerns, and missing information on an MSDS may increase the risk to emergency responders."

In an October 2001 safety alert, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' Center for Chemical Process Safety warned that "MSDS for the same material but from different sources can vary considerably in what they report as hazards."

Chorus of Criticism

Union representatives and others involved with workplace safety say that while some MSDS are wrong or lack critical information, others are full of confusing, contradictory, and obscure language.

"There is something seriously wrong here," said Diane Stein, a safety specialist with the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union (PACE). "We don't want to trash MSDSs entirely. There is a lot of useful information in them. We would like to see some improvements."

"MSDSs are really weak," said Mark Dudzic, president of the PACE local for the Morton facility. "You can't rely on them."

Mark Roehler, a chemical technologist and principal in Lehder, a Canadian environmental and safety consulting firm, said that many MSDSs are written to fulfill the letter of the law rather than the spirit of providing useful information. Lehder helps organizations such as schools determine if their MSDSs are accurate, and lobbies the supplier to correct the information if it is wrong.

"It doesn't surprise me that people can get hurt with faulty information, but I couldn't give you a percentage of how often they are inaccurate," Roehler said. "I've seen a lot of really bad MSDSs over the years."

Michael Wright, director of health, safety, and environment for the United Steelworkers, said it is not uncommon to find this stock phrase on an MSDS: "Nothing in this mixture is hazardous under 29 CFR 1910.1200."

Wright noted that the same MSDS also may advise that the chemical be used with adequate ventilation, skin contact be avoided, vapors not be inhaled, and respiratory protection approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health be used.

"What's the message here?" Wright asked. "It's not hazardous, but don't let it get near you."

Wright said USW was asked by one of its locals to evaluate MSDSs for ceramic fibers produced by two manufacturers. Although the products were similar, the first manufacturer's MSDS included the phrase "Warning: Causes Cancer." The second MSDS said, "Note: This material has been associated with malignant and nonmalignant neoplasms in experimental animals via interperitoneal installation. As this route of exposure does not mimic the human experience, the significance of this finding is uncertain."

Although manufacturers are required to include warnings on MSDSs if the material is a possible human carcinogen, the law does not prohibit using technical language that few people will understand.

Old Problem, Unions Say

Although OSHA contends that faulty MSDSs are rare, and NIOSH has not studied the issue, PACE's Stein contends the problem is not new.

"People involved in the labor movement have been working on this for a long time," she said.

When teaching worker safety classes, Stein uses materials prepared by the Labor Institute that cite a 1986 study by David Chawes, an industrial hygienist who reviewed more than 450 MSDSs for hazardous substances used by health care workers. Chawes found that more than half of the documents left blanks in places where there was supposed to be information, and 30 percent lacked internal consistency, such as stating that the substance was not hazardous while advising the use of a respirator. Less than 3 percent of all the MSDSs were judged to be of a quality acceptable for employees to use.

"Employees are taught to rely on the MSDS as the source of hazard information, yet few MSDSs stand up to even simple scrutiny," Chawes wrote.

A spokesman for the New York-based Labor Institute said the materials are used in union worker safety programs that are funded by grants from OSHA, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, and various state agencies. He estimated that at least 25,000 workers have been trained with the materials.

Warning Signs

Although Chawes, Roehler, and Wright note that many of the mistakes found on MSDSs only can be detected by a person with some knowledge of chemistry, they note that sometimes there are obvious signals that something is wrong:

Brevity: Two different manufacturers make the same substance. One provides a 12-page MSDS and the other just three pages. The brevity of the second MSDS should be an alert that the manufacturer may not be providing all relevant information, according to Roehler.

Inconsistency: An example from Chawes is a product described as a liquid in one place, but discussed in another part of the document as if it is a gas.

Technical Jargon: On May 4, 1988, a plant owned by the Pacific Engineering & Production Co. in Henderson, Nev., was leveled by a series of explosions. The blasts killed two employees, injured 350 workers and local residents, and caused property damage up to 12 miles away, according to a report prepared by the USW. The facility made ammonium perchlorate, an oxidant used in rockets and missiles.

The blasts were caused by a fire that ignited the ammonium perchlorate. Nowhere on the two-page MSDS prepared by the company was the material described as explosive. The document states simply that "spontaneous decomposition will occur" if the material is heated above 300 degrees C. According to the report, federal investigators later rated the total force of the explosions generated by the decomposition as equivalent to 340 tons of TNT.

Use Multiple Information Sources

In its safety alert, EPA suggested obtaining information about each hazardous material from several sources. A number of chemical information sources are available on the Internet, including:

Computer-Aided Management of Emergency Operations (CAMEO): This software is available from EPA at http://www.epa.gov/ceppo/cameo/what.htm. CAMEO uses a chemical database of over 6,000 substances with chemical-specific information on hazards and controls.

ChemFinder.Com A World Wide Web server at http://chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com/ contains information on about 75,000 compounds. The information is maintained by the CambridgeSoft Corp., a supplier of life science software and chemical databases.

Vermont Safety Information Resources Inc. The Web site at http://www.hazard.com/msds/index.php operated by this small nonprofit contains MSDSs and links to MSDSs for about 200,000 chemicals.

International Programme on Chemical Safety This NIOSH Web site at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ipcs/ipcscard.htmlcontains international chemical safety cards for about 1,400 chemicals commonly found in the workplace. The cards provide much of the same information as an MSDS in an easier to understand format.

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OSHA Rule Lists Requirements

OSHA's requirements for MSDS can be found at 29 CFR 1910.1200 (g). The requirements include the following: the chemical and common names of all ingredients which have been determined to be health hazards; physical and chemical characteristics (such as vapor pressure, flashpoint); physical hazards (potential for fire, explosion, and reactivity; health hazards; primary routes of entry into human beings; permissable exposure limits; whether the chemical is listed as a carcinogen; precautions for safe handling and use (including protective measures during repair and maintenance of contaminated equipment); applicable control measures (such as appropriate engineering controls, personal protective equipment; emergency and first aid procedures; date of preparation of the MSDS, contact information for the party responsible for preparing the MSDS.

There is also a voluntary standard for preparing MSDSs published by the American National Standards Institute (ANZI Z400.1-1998), which is available for purchase for $100 from http://ansi.org/.

By John Gannon

Copyright � 2002 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., Washington D.C.

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