The Dept. of Transportation has pushed back the effective date of a Final Rule clarifying the applicability of hazardous-materials regulations on carriers’ loading, unloading and storage operations. HM-223 will now go into effect on June 1, 2005, rather than January 1.
The delay was published in the Federal Register on December 8, 2004.
HM-223 was originally published on October 30, 2003; on May 28, 2004, the effective date was pushed back to January 1, 2005, to give the agency “sufficient time to fully address the issues raised by the appellants and to coordinate the appeals document fully with the other Federal agencies that assisted us in developing the HM-223 final rule.”
DOT announced last week that it needed still more time to complete this task, and was thus delaying the effective date once more.
