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BACK ON TRACK HARMONISATION • PHMSA HAS AT LONG LAST CAUGHT UP WITH INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS, ALTHOUGH AS EVER IT HAS CHOSEN TO OMIT SOME NEW PROVISIONS THE CURRENT US administration in Washington, DC does not look kindly on regulation, seeing it as too often representing a burden on industry, and has pressed the various departments and agencies to refrain from additional regulation and, when new regulation is thought necessary, to provide justification for it. Under this environment, the various agencies of the US Department for Transportation (DOT) have sometimes struggled to implement safety-critical changes to the provisions contained in the Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR).
Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the multimodal agency that has primary responsibility for maintaining HMR. Its HM-215O rulemaking, designed to keep US regulations in step with international rules (insofar as is deemed necessary) was published as a final rule only on 11 May 2020, despite the fact that the international regulations it mirrors took effect at the start of 2019 and that the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) was published on 27 November 2018. That NPRM drew many comments, not
So it has been with the latest biennial harmonisation rule from the Pipeline and
least from those concerned that any delay to publication of the final rule would cause problems in international intermodal transport, since HMR would then be out of step. PHMSA understood their concerns and, on 18 December 2018, issued a Notice of Enforcement Policy authorising the use
PHMSA’S HQ (OPPOSITE) HAS STRUGGLED TO GET THE HARMONISATION RULEMAKING SIGNED OFF
HCB MONTHLY | SEPTEMBER 2020
of the applicable international standards, viz the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) Technical Instructions 2019-2020 for air transport and Amendment 39-18 to the International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) Code for sea transport. In the final rule, those two sets of regulations have been incorporated by reference into HMR, along with the 20th revised edition of the UN Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods (the ‘Model Regulations’), Amendment 1 to the 6th revised edition of the UN Manual of Tests and Criteria, and the 7th revised edition of the Globally Harmonised System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS). In addition, PHMSA has updated its incorporation by reference of Transport Canada’s Transportation of Dangerous Goods (TDG) Regulations to include amendments made in 2016 and 2017, and is also adopting a number of updated standards published by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). MAIN CHANGES The amendments to HMR included in HM-215O are broadly in line with those contained in the UN Model Regulations, including additions, revisions and deletions in the Hazardous
