OSHA Revokes Open Fires in Marine Terminals Standard

When a federal standard disappears from the books, the compliance question doesn't disappear with it — it just changes shape.

OSHA has finalized the revocation of 29 CFR Part 1917, Subpart D, the agency's longstanding Open Fires in Marine Terminals standard. The rule was published in the Federal Register on April 28, 2026 (Docket No. OSHA-2022-0001, Document No. 2026-08260), and marine terminal operators across the country now need to understand what this means for their safety programs — and what gaps, if any, just opened up in their compliance posture.

This isn't the kind of regulatory change you can file away and forget. Any time OSHA removes a specific standard from the Code of Federal Regulations, the question that immediately follows is: what fills the space? In most cases, the answer involves the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act, Section 5(a)(1), which requires employers to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards. That answer can actually create more compliance exposure for an unprepared operator, not less.

What OSHA Actually Did — and Why

OSHA's revocation of the Open Fires in Marine Terminals standard follows the agency's broader effort to identify and eliminate outdated, duplicative, or obsolete rules. The 29 CFR Part 1917 Subpart D provisions addressed open-fire hazards — burning materials, disposal fires, and similar ignition sources — in marine cargo-handling environments.

OSHA's stated rationale is that existing, broader standards already adequately cover the hazards that the specific open-fires rule was designed to address. The agency has pointed to overlapping coverage from fire protection standards, hazard communication requirements, and General Industry rules as sufficient to protect workers in these environments.

In my view, that rationale is defensible as a regulatory matter. The harder question is whether the facilities themselves have the documentation, training, and procedural infrastructure to demonstrate compliance under those broader frameworks — because that's where enforcement attention will eventually land.

According to OSHA, the agency has revoked more than 100 standards under its Standards Improvement Project over the past two decades, with this revocation representing one of the most operationally specific removals in the maritime sector in recent years.

The Effective Date and What Changes on That Date

The revocation is effective as of the publication date: April 28, 2026. There is no phase-in period.

What this means practically:

• 29 CFR Part 1917, Subpart D — the specific Open Fires in Marine Terminals standard — is removed from the Code of Federal Regulations.
• Citations under that specific subpart are no longer available to OSHA compliance officers for new enforcement actions after the effective date.
• Existing citations issued before April 28, 2026 are not retroactively invalidated. If you have an open citation under this standard, that case proceeds under the rules in effect at the time of the violation.
• Going forward, open-fire hazards in marine terminals fall under the General Duty Clause and any other applicable fire-related standards, including those in 29 CFR Part 1910 (General Industry) and 29 CFR Part 1917 more broadly.

The date is clean and immediate. If your compliance calendar still has a line item for "29 CFR Part 1917 Subpart D audit," that item needs to be updated — not removed, but re-scoped.

What Doesn't Change: The Hazard Is Still There

This is the part that most operators will miss if they read this news as "OSHA removed a requirement."

OSHA removed a specific standard. The underlying hazard — open fires and ignition sources in a marine terminal environment — remains a recognized hazard under Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act. That's the General Duty Clause, and it has real teeth. OSHA can and does cite employers under Section 5(a)(1) when a recognized hazard exists and the employer has not taken feasible steps to address it, even in the absence of a specific standard.

In fact, General Duty Clause citations can carry higher penalties in some circumstances precisely because they require OSHA to demonstrate that the hazard was "recognized" — which becomes straightforward when an employer has its own safety procedures acknowledging the risk, or when industry guidance documents the hazard.

The practical upshot: if your terminal has open-fire hazards and you remove the specific compliance controls you maintained under Subpart D without replacing them with equivalent or better controls, you have increased your enforcement exposure, not reduced it.

How the Compliance Landscape Looks Now

The table below maps the previous regulatory framework against the post-revocation landscape for key open-fire hazard categories in marine terminals.

The right read on this table is not "coverage went away" but rather "coverage is now distributed across multiple standards and the General Duty Clause." That's a harder compliance story to tell an auditor — and a harder case to defend if OSHA shows up after an incident.

What Marine Terminal Operators Should Do Right Now

If you operate a marine terminal, or if you provide compliance consulting or EHS support to one, here are the practical steps worth taking now.

1. Audit your existing open-fire procedures and map them to current standards.

Your written programs may still reference 29 CFR 1917 Subpart D by citation. Those citation references are now obsolete. More importantly, if your procedures were only grounded in Subpart D, you need to re-anchor them under the General Duty Clause, 29 CFR 1917.30, applicable NFPA standards, and any state or local fire codes. A procedure that cites a revoked standard is not a compliance shield — it's a paperwork gap.

2. Update your training records and program documentation.

Training records tied to a specific standard that no longer exists create ambiguity about what your employees were actually trained on and why. Reframe the training content under its surviving regulatory basis. This is also a good moment to verify that your employees' training reflects current NFPA guidance, which OSHA inspectors will often treat as the benchmark for "recognized industry practice" when assessing General Duty Clause compliance.

3. Review your hot work permit program for terminal-specific gaps.

Hot work in marine terminal environments often intersects with open-fire hazards — welding, cutting, and grinding operations near cargo, fuel systems, and flammable materials. 29 CFR 1910.252 and NFPA 51B cover hot work, but your permit program should be explicit about how it addresses the marine terminal context. If it was previously anchored partly on Subpart D requirements, review it now.

4. Don't rely on state plan states to mirror the federal action automatically.

Twenty-nine states operate their own OSHA-approved state plans. Those state plans adopt federal standards, but revocations are not always immediate on the state side. If you operate terminals in California (Cal/OSHA), Michigan (MIOSHA), or another state plan state, confirm whether the state has formally adopted this revocation or whether the state-level standard remains in effect. Operating in a state plan state and assuming federal revocation = state revocation is a compliance mistake I see regularly.

5. Document the reasoning behind any program changes you make.

This is the advice that sounds bureaucratic but saves clients in audits. When you update your programs to reflect this revocation, write a short rationale document: what changed, when it changed, what the new regulatory basis is, and what you verified before making the update. A compliance file that shows thoughtful, reasoned response to a regulatory change is far more defensible than one that just has updated dates on old documents.

The General Duty Clause Reality Check

Because this keeps coming up, it's worth being direct about how the General Duty Clause actually works in practice.

Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act states that every employer must furnish employees a place of employment "free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm." To issue a General Duty Clause citation, OSHA must show: (1) a hazard existed; (2) the employer or the industry recognized the hazard; (3) the hazard was causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm; and (4) a feasible means of abatement was available.

Open fires in a marine terminal environment satisfy elements one through three almost automatically — fire hazards in cargo-handling environments near flammable materials are textbook recognized hazards. The question OSHA will focus on is element four: what feasible abatement did you have in place, and did it actually work?

Your answer to that question is your compliance posture. It needs to be written down, trained on, audited periodically, and updated when conditions change. The revocation of Subpart D doesn't change the standard of care — it just removes the specific checklist that used to frame it.

A Note on Multi-Jurisdictional Terminals

Large marine terminal operators frequently straddle multiple jurisdictions — federal OSHA, state plan states, Coast Guard requirements, and local fire codes. This revocation sits in federal OSHA jurisdiction, but the hazards it addressed overlap with:

• 33 CFR Parts 126 and 127 (U.S. Coast Guard regulations on waterfront facilities handling dangerous cargo)
• NFPA 307 (Construction and Fire Protection of Marine Terminals, Piers, and Wharves)
• Local fire marshal requirements, which vary by port and municipality

A compliance program that was already integrating these frameworks is in a better position than one that relied heavily on 29 CFR 1917 Subpart D as its primary authority. If your program was the latter, this is a good time to build toward the former.

What This Means if You're Preparing for an OSHA Inspection

OSHA compliance officers in maritime enforcement know that the revocation happened. What they'll be looking for in your terminal is evidence that your safety program is substantively sound — that you haven't treated the revocation as permission to relax controls.

The inspection areas most likely to draw attention in the post-revocation environment include:

• Written programs that cite outdated standards without updating their regulatory basis
• Training records showing employees were trained on "the old standard" with no updated training to reflect current requirements
• Hot work permit programs with gaps specific to the marine terminal environment
• Absence of documented fire hazard assessment for areas of the terminal where open fires or ignition sources are a realistic scenario
• Incident and near-miss logs that show fire-related events without documented corrective actions

None of these are new concerns. They're the same things a diligent OSHA inspector would have reviewed under the old standard. The revocation just changes which line in the citation sheet they'd use if they found something deficient.

Working With a Consultant on This

At Certify Consulting, I've helped more than 200 clients navigate exactly this kind of regulatory transition — the kind where the rule changes in a way that technically reduces your specific standard obligations while actually increasing your General Duty Clause exposure if you're not careful.

The work here isn't complicated, but it does require methodical attention: map your existing programs, identify the regulatory anchors that survive, re-document accordingly, and verify your training and recordkeeping reflect the updated basis. Done right, it takes a few days of focused effort. Done wrong — or not done at all — it's the kind of gap that shows up in the worst possible context.

If you're a marine terminal operator or EHS manager trying to figure out exactly what your compliance program needs to look like under the post-revocation framework, reach out to Certify Consulting for a program gap assessment.

You can also explore our broader maritime and general industry compliance resources for additional guidance on OSHA standards that intersect with terminal operations.

Last updated: 2026-05-14

Source: Federal Register, Vol. 91, April 28, 2026 — OSHA Docket No. OSHA-2022-0001, Document No. 2026-08260. Federal Register notice.