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VII. Effective Date

In developing the Final Rule, OSHA has considered whether a delayed effective date is necessary for any of the provisions of the standard. Employers will need adequate time to integrate their procedures for complying with the lockout and tagging provisions in this standard into the procedures used under the generic lockout standard, 1910.147, published on September 1, 1989 (54 FR 36644), and under the lockout requirements of the electrical safety-related work practices standard, published on August 6, 1990 (55 FR 31984). The work practices developed under final 1910.269 will also have to be blended into the work practices required by the Subpart S standard. A period of 120 days should be adequate for this purpose, since most of the requirements in the Final Rule do not require extensive retrofitting or major modifications of existing equipment. The recently published electrical safety-related work practices and generic lockout standards, which are similar types of standards, also gave employers 120 days delay in effective date. Lastly, this amount of time should be adequate for employers to ensure that their work practices conform to the requirements of the new standard.

However, OSHA received evidence during the Subpart S rulemaking that it could take some electric utility employers a year or more to incorporate the training required by that standard into their existing training programs. The preamble to the final electrical safety-related work practices standard cited the testimony of Mr. Lamont Turner, who stated, on behalf of Edison Electric Institute, that it took his company 15 months to restructure their training program in order to meet regulations on hazardous waste (55 FR 32013-32014). This standard provided a 1-year's delay in effective date for its training requirements, and OSHA found this delay to be appropriate. Therefore, OSHA is similarly making the requirements on training contained in 1910.269(a)(2) effective one year from the date of publication of the standard.

[59 FR 4320, Jan. 31, 1994; 59 FR 33658, June 30, 1994]