Time for Chemical Plant Security
Those of us who live in the Houston-Galveston or the Golden Triangle areas of southeast Texas will hardly be surprised by the news that…guess what??…we live smack in the middle of perhaps the most target-rich environment available to potential terrorists. With the petrochemical industry taking it’s place as the 800-lb. gorilla in southeast Texas, all of us here in the eight-county metropolitan area essentially live with a loaded gun to our head. No, we don’t live in fear of what might happen, but anyone here can tell you just how easy it would be for a terrorist or anyone else with bad intent to wreak a maximum of death and destruction with a relative minimum of effort.
Shortly after 9.11, I watched a 60 Minutes segment in which Steve Croft held forth on just how lax and inadequate security really is at most refineries and chemical plants nationwide. This is hardly news; this has been common and very public knowledge for years. The problem, though, is how to address glaring security issues in plants that for the most part were never designed with security in mind. Since most pertrochemical plants and refineries are HUGE undertakings, covering many acres and almost completely exposed from the air, how exactly do we make plants more safe and secure…especially when we know that this is perhaps our greatest and most glaring vulnerability?
It is hard to believe, but more than four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has still not acted to make chemical plants, one of the nation’s greatest terrorist vulnerabilities, safer. Last week, Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, unveiled a bipartisan chemical plant security bill….
If terrorists attacked a chemical plant, the death toll could be enormous. A single breached chlorine tank could, according to the Department of Homeland Security, lead to 17,500 deaths, 10,000 severe injuries and 100,000 hospitalizations. Many chemical plants have shockingly little security to defend against such attacks.
After 9/11, there were immediate calls for the government to impose new security requirements on these plants. But the chemical industry, which contributes heavily to political campaigns, has used its influence in Washington to block these efforts. Senator Collins, the chairwoman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has held hearings on chemical plant security, and has now come up with this bill with both Republican and Democratic sponsors.
The bill requires chemical plants to conduct vulnerability assessments and develop security and emergency response plans. The Department of Homeland Security would be required to develop performance standards for chemical plant security. In extreme cases, plants that do not meet the standards could be shut down.
Not a day goes by that I don’t drive by a chemical plant and wonder “What if…?” Here we are, more than four years after 9.11…and security seems every bit as lax as it ever was. I can’t tell you how often I drive by a chemical plant, only to notice that the only security presence is a single police car, or a guard shack at the plant entrance…as if a terrorist is going to come through the front door. Look along the fence line, and see if you don’t notice multiple points that could be easily and quickly breached. Anyone with half a brain and some bad intentions could find their way to doing some serious damage, and without significant effort. And this doesn’t even address the threat from the air.
How long until some nutjob with a Cessna and a fertilizer bomb tries to take out a refinery in a Kamikaze attack? How many people will have to die here, or in Los Angeles, or Gary, IN, or Pittsburgh, before we wake up and realize just how serious this threat is?
My suggestion? Don’t be holding your breath hoping for a change.
