The proposal was a major point of discussion at a Nov. 14 "roundtable" meeting in Washington, where industry officials and EPA regulators examined ways to improve current methods on tracking chemical releases. Participants at the meeting, sponsored by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), generally agreed that current reporting practices were inadequate, but offered varying suggestions for improving chemical tracking. The meeting was attended by officials from EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well as academics, environmentalists and industry leaders.

The potential regulations discussed at the day-long meeting would require the approximate 15,000 chemical plants covered by EPA's RMP program to report accidental spills more frequently that may pose threats to nearby residents. The RMP program was established under the Clean Air Act and requires chemical facilities and other industrial plants that handle dangerous materials to assess the potential effects on nearby residents of accidental, evaluate worst-case scenarios and develop prevention plants.

Sources from EPA's Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office (CEPPO) say the agency is engaged in a cost-benefit review of the potential reporting requirements. These sources say there has been some discussion about this topic within CEPPO following the roundtable conference, but no formal meetings with agency management have been scheduled.

But environmentalists are criticizing the potential EPA rules as misdirected, arguing that the current reporting requirements are too limited in scope and that more frequent reports would not address this problem. Instead, environmentalists are calling for an overhaul of the program scope and that chemical plants should be required to report to EPA the same spills that they report to the National Response Center (NRC). The NRC is staffed by the U.S. Coast Guard and is responsible for notifying emergency response units of chemical, oil, radiological and biological discharges.

Industry officials, on the other hand, support the potential EPA rule, so long as the scope of the reporting requirements remain unaltered. Industry argues that the increased reporting will provide an important tool in assessing the effectiveness of government efforts to prevent chemical accidents. This reporting would help determine whether EPA, OSHA and the chemical safety board are working positively to reduce major chemical accidents, industry sources say. "This will allow us to draw information out of a larger sample size, allowing us to come up with a longer-range plan [for improving ways of handling chemical spills]," an industry source says.

Concerns were also brought up at the meeting that under the current requirements, plants could circumvent reporting incidents by moving in and out of the RMP category. Since plants are covered under RMP by the types and amounts of chemicals that they use, a facility could avoid reporting by cutting down on its output to allow it to drop out of its RMP category, sources say. These sources also say that shifting to annual reporting would minimize that problem.

But broadening RMP requirements would require new legislation, which chemical safety board sources say is not likely