U.S. Response: Officials Increase Chemical Security

Two U.S. senators introduced legislation last week that would order the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department to enforce tougher regulations to safeguard hazardous chemical facilities from terrorist attack.  Government and chemical industry officials said they are trying to increase security at chemical facilities and during transportation of hazardous substances since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, according to yesterday’s Washington Post.

The chemical industry has issued tougher security guidelines since Sept. 11.  “No one needed to convince us that we could—and indeed would be—a target at some future date,” said Frederick Webber, president of the American Chemistry Council, which represents 180 chemical companies. 

The railroad industry imposed a 72-hour moratorium on transporting dangerous chemicals immediately after U.S. bombing began in Afghanistan on Oct. 7.  Shipments resumed after the chemical industry said chlorine was essential to various systems and products, such as processing sewage and producing Cipro, the primary antibiotic that has been used to prevent anthrax infection (see GSN, Oct. 31).  Industry representatives added that authorities had no evidence of a threat to the shipments from terrorists.

Chemical companies are “doing as good a job as they can do right now, and they’re very aware of where their vulnerabilities might be,” EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said Friday.

Chemical Sites Not Secure, Say Activists

The chemical industry, however, “continues to maintain excessive hazardous substances in heavily populated areas, materials that if they get loose can cover schools, hospitals and residential areas with toxic fumes at dangerous levels,” said Paul Orum of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know.

Greenpeace activists broke into a Dow Chemical plant near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last February and gained access to the plant’s control panel that regulates discharges into the Mississippi River to prove security was lax.  No cameras or guards patrolled the plant’s perimeter, and the door to the control room was unlocked, according to the activists.  Officials at the Dow Chemical plant said a worst-case scenario at the plant would be the release of 800,000 pounds of hydrogen chloride, which could threaten 370,000 people. 

A 1999 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said industrial chemicals such as chlorine, sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid could provide terrorists with “readily accessible materials” for weapons and found that security at chemical plants “ranged from fair to very poor.” 

“Most of the security gaps were the result of complacency and lack of awareness of the threat.  Chemical plant security managers were very pessimistic about their ability to deter sabotage by employees,” the report said (Eric Pianin, Washington Post, Nov. 12).

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