Follow-Up 0
More on this, which I mentioned a little while ago:
Under the revised list, poultry growers won’t have to file complex risk assessments for the propane they use to heat their chicken houses, two sources familiar with the regulations said.
An original list of 344 chemicals — some with specific weight thresholds — was proposed in April and caused an uproar among businesses that assumed they would be exempt from such terror-related reporting laws. Chicken farms fell under the umbrella of any business with more than 7,500 pounds of propane.
“It’s just silly,” said Pocomoke City chicken farmer Gary Pilchard who has more than 7,500 pounds of propane at each of his six chicken houses. “That’s the problem sometimes in Washington. You get folks sitting behind a desk, that might sound like a lot of propane, but in our world, that’s not.”
The rule ruffled other feathers as well.
Many of the chemicals on the department’s list are found on college campuses, but in small amounts. For instance, hydrogen chloride is used in chemistry experiments in several Yale University labs, said Peter Reinhardt, the school’s director of environmental health and safety. Each lab could carry between 3 and 5 pounds of hydrogen chloride at any given time, Reinhardt said.
But on the Homeland Security chemicals list, any amount of hydrogen chloride would need to be reported. Of the 344 chemicals on the original list, businesses would have to report any amount of 105 of them, including hydrogen chloride.
(More on hydrogen chloride here.)
