Title: Complaints about 'Any Amount' Screening Quantity Thresholds

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Chemical & Engineering News (May 21, 2007, Vol 85, Number 21, page 8), a weekly news magazine from the American Chemical Society, has finally noticed that the proposed appendix for the new chemical plant security rules may have a significant impact on the way that chemical and biology labs in Universities have to operate. The problem that they note is that many chemicals on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of Chemicals of Interest with listed limits of 'Any Amount' can be found in small quantities in almost any lab in the country.

This is an issue that a number of University and hospital labs have pointed out in their comments to the proposed list. C&EN is just a little too late with this information to be of practical interest because the comment period closed almost two weeks ago. Timely information may have resulted in a few more comments from various labs; and not just the University and hospital labs that have commented to date. Now it is too late for any additional comments to effect the DHS decisions about the final form this appendix will take.

Most of the chemicals with the annotation of 'any amount' can either be used as war gasses or are used to make war gasses. It seems that DHS was trying to determine how many facilities had these chemicals available that might allow terrorist to acquire them to make small scale chemical munitions. It appears that DHS grossly underestimated how many facilities they might be dealing with. Of course, that is one of the reasons that DHS put the list out for comments prior to putting it into the regulation. The asking for comments in the regulatory process is a tacit admission by the government that they are not omniscient.

What a lot of people are missing is that part of the reason that DHS established an on-line Top Screen process is to collect information on the level of potential threat out in the real world. Congress only gave DHS the authority to regulate 'High-Risk' chemical facilities and DHS is using the Top Screen to figure out what facilities are high-risk. But, they are also using it to collect information on how pervasive these risky chemicals are in the economy, something that no one currently knows.

The registration process for the Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT) is relatively painless. The Top Screen data submission process, while it has not been revealed yet, probably will not be too difficult either. It will not be until facilities get to the Security Vulnerability Assessment (SVA) and the Site Security Plans (SSP) that things will start to get involved and costly. It would be nice to have DHS stick by their guns and require a wide variety of commercial and institutional entities report on their use of potentially hazardous chemicals so that there is a reasonable information base to use for future legislative action.

It does not take a large amount of these chemicals to mount a successful terrorist attack. The current regulations, at Congressional direction, do not try to address these lower level attacks; thee regulations are directed at facilities that could result in high levels of casualties in the event of a successful attack; in other words a mass casualty terrorist attack. Sooner or later, the terrorists, and not necessarily Muslim terrorists, will start attacks in the United States at the same smaller scales that we see today in Israel, Iraq, and other places around the world. When that happens there will be an out cry to regulate access to these smaller amounts of chemicals. It would be nice to have some idea of the potential amount of regulation that would be necessary in advance.

About the Author: Patrick J. Coyle has 15 years experience with the US Army, including a stint as a Physical Security NCO in Europe. He has also spent 12 years working as a Process Chemist is a specialty chemical manufacturing company.

Further information about the new regulations concerning protecting chemical plants from terrorist attack can be found at http://www.members.aol.com/ChemPlantSec/ChemPlantSecurity.htm