The Department of Homeland Security is currently soliciting public comment on proposed regulations designed to tighten security at high-risk chemical plants and on freight trains carrying hazardous material. Here’s our comment: What took you so long?
It’s been more than a decade since a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 170 innocent people. Managing risk requires a clear idea of what could possibly go wrong, as well as the likely consequences. The federal government should have figured out long before now that a terrorist attack on a chemical facility or HAZMAT-carrying freight train would be disastrous. This is especially critical for the Washington region because so much HAZMAT rail freight traffic literally goes through the city and surrounding suburbs.
By 2003, when the newly formed DHS finally began looking at the chemical industry, significant investments in voluntary security upgrades had already been made. Like the response to Hurricane Katrina, the private sector was way ahead of the government on this one, too. Last October — more than five years after Sept. 11 — Congress finally got around to authorizing DHS to regulate chemical plants on the basis of national security, in addition to existing chemical safety and environmental protection.
In a nod to the steps plant owners and operators have already taken to secure their facilities, the new rules will allow them to determine the appropriate mix of security measures needed after conducting a vulnerability assessment based on new federal performance standards governing perimeter control, access, theft and potential for internal sabotage. Failure to comply with the new standards could trigger fines of up to $25,000 per day or an order to shut down.
The second set of proposed rules deal with the transport of HAZMAT, 90 percent of which is shipped either by rail or water. Robert Jamison, deputy administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, pointed out that “less than 1 percent of all shipments that travel by rail are toxic by inhalation” — but that fraction includes chlorine (needed to purify municipal water supplies) and anhydrous ammonia (used in fertilizer), both fatal if inhaled.
The unpredictability inherent in rail shipping mitigates some of the threat, and since moving rail cars are harder to target than stopped ones, keeping them moving through high-risk urban areas such as Washington is crucial. The new regulations substantially reduce standing times for unattended freight cars, establish secure custody transfers, and create a tracking system that allows federal regulators to locate cars loaded with toxic inhalants within 30 minutes — all overdue accommodations to the post-Sept. 11 world.
However, there’s a danger that complacency will set in as the government rules kick in. Without them, plant managers and rail operators had to rely on their own survival instincts. Bureaucratic rule-making will never substitute for this collective brain trust, and DHS officials must vow to work collaboratively with — not against — industry experts.
Perpetually staying one step ahead of the terrorists will require seat-of-the-pants judgment calls based on years of experience that can only be gained in the field, not in a Washington bureaucrat’s cubicle.
