During a presentation at the recent Rutgers Office of Continuing Professional Education program on the NJ DPCC program, Beth Reddy, Section Chief of the Discharge Prevention Engineering Review Section, indicated that the Department is reducing scrutiny of regulated facilities. In the past, all facilities required to have DPCC/DCR plans were subject to an annual inspection by an employee of the Department. Per Ms. Reddy, moving forward these annual inspections will be combined with the Technical Review of plan renewals and will only be occurring once every 3 years. There are far fewer employees working in the DPCC (Discharge Prevention Containment and Countermeasures) program and as a result, facility inspections have been cut back significantly. The Technical Review of plan renewals typically occur in a scheduled visit, which will be to the advantage of regulated facilities.
Additionally Ms. Reddy requested that facilities only submit pages of a regulated facility’s DPCC/DCR plan that require changes as part of a plan renewal submission. This will allow the employees of the Department to review plans faster as they will not need to compare the entire new plan to the previous one in order to determine what has changed.
One of the many issues that can arise in the DPCC program is over the determination of the “storage capacity” of mixed use warehouses that can store a variety of materials including both listed substances as well as normal consumer goods. There are 2 ways for a warehouse of this type to determine their storage capacity. The first option is to specifically mark out an area of the facility that will be used to store hazardous materials. This option is not always possible in warehouses that require a great deal of flexibility due to varying product mixes. In this case, facilities may look at their historical data on their storage of hazardous materials over the past 3 years to make a determination of storage capacity.
One requirement of a DCR (Discharge Cleanup and Removal) Plan is to have a current agreement with the Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC). Since NJ has a separate LEPC for each municipality in the state, there are typically very few employees (often a police sergeant who is responsible for multiple other programs), facilities can have a difficult time obtaining these agreements. DEP will accept an honest attempt to reach an agreement if a facility can produce records that show proof of an appropriate attempt. It is recommended that facilities have records showing proof of delivery of a letter (or letters) requesting such an agreement with their LEPC.