The federal officials at the Occupald me it was legitimate.
So I did a column about it, because it struck me as being kind of silly for a federal agency to be telling people about what water can and can’t do.
A few days later, I got a call from a spokesperson for OSHA who said: “OSHA does not issue MSDS’s for water. There is no such thing as an MSDS for water.
“We can understand people spoofing OSHA. We’ve had a whole year of this. When we deserve it, we deserve it, but here we don’t. It goes against what OSHA stands for.
“Yes, there have been situations where overzealous OSHA inspectors have said someone needs an MSDS when they don’t and a citation is issued, but they are extremely rare, given the tens of thousands of inspections we do.”
I checked back with the businessman who had given me the MSDS, and I realized that I had goofed. From what he had said originally, I had assumed that he had received the MSDS from OSHA.
But it turned out he hadn’t. Instead, he had been browsing through a university database that contains a voluminous listing of MSDS documents. And he had come across the one for water. So he got a copy of it and decided to pass it along to me.
“So I’ve been duped by a spoof,” I said.
“No,” he said, “I know an MSDS when I see one, and this one is legitimate.”
So I started trying to track down the source of the water MSDS. But before I finished, there was another call from the OSHA spokesperson.
“Yes, the MSDS for water does exist. A company in New Jersey did an MSDS for every substance under the sun. We aren’t the people who devised it. A lot of consultants advise companies on making MSDS’s, telling them they need them for everything known to man. They make a lot of money doing that.”
Then the spokesperson said that as a result of my column, some congressmen had just introduced a whimsical amendment withholding funds for any MSDS’s on water, and the spokesperson bemoaned the anti-bureaucratic raps that OSHA endures.
“When this Congress started out, they were saying all sorts of things, like we killed the tooth fairy because we wouldn’t let dentists give patients back their extracted teeth. Or that we think sand is poison. Or that we think chalk is poison. It has been endless.
“The standard that OSHA has is that if someone works with hazardous material, he has the right to know what is in it and the potential side effects. I talked about the consultants, but society is so lawsuit happy that manufacturers include (the MSDS’s) with all substances to protect themselves.
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“I’ve heard of MSDS’s for bricks and that OSHA thought bricks and sand were poison and that we required them for lumber.
“Lumber in another form can be hazardous–wood dust can be hazardous if you breathe it. If you use sand for blasting, it becomes so fine that it can cause silicosis, which is cancer. But they said we think beaches are hazardous.
“It’s a question of which criticism OSHA deserves and what we don’t deserve.”
Which is only fair, and in this case, OSHA didn’t deserve the criticism and I apologize for my carelessness.
As for the water MSDS, a spokesman for the New Jersey firm that created it said:
“We’re not the only company that has one of these on file. No, OSHA doesn’t require an MSDS for water. But some customers want everything coming into their plants to have an MSDS. They want every last thing documented.
“To meet that requirement, we make the MSDS, and we developed an MSDS for water.
“It gets to be a point where you say, `If that’s what you want as a customer, we will do it for you.’ “
So although OSHA wasn’t at fault, the fact that some businesses actually pay consultants to create documents on the uses of water just shows how nervous the government and its regulations have made them.
Oh, well, I guess it creates employment. If you are a consultant.