US to issue site security guidelines in weeks

21 July 2008 23:57  [Source: ICIS news]

BETHESDA, Maryland (ICIS news)--US security officials will issue guidelines within weeks to help 7,000 US chemical facilities comply with new federal requirements for protecting those sites against terrorist attack, top administrators said on Monday.

 

Sue Armstrong, deputy chief of staff for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told a chemicals industry security conference that the extensive guidelines on how plant operators can comply with federal antiterrorism regulations will be issued in proposed form in a couple of weeks and will be generally available as a public document.

 

Dennis Deziel, the department’s deputy director for infrastructure security compliance, told the sixth annual chemical security summit that the guidelines for meeting obligations under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) initially ran more than 400 pages but have been slimmed down to a more manageable 150 pages.

 

He also said the guidelines at first were to be kept restricted for official use only but that the department has decided to make the guidelines generally available and will post them on the department’s Web site as soon as they are available.

 

The guidelines will instruct operators of the so-called high-risk 7,010 chemical facilities how to use risk-based and performance-based criteria in 18 areas of site security, such as perimeter defence, securing highly toxic or flammable chemical substances, cyber and employee security and record keeping.

 

The more than 7,000 facilities have been identified by the department as high risk because they produce, store or use threshold quantities of any of 300 highly toxic, flammable or otherwise hazardous chemicals that could pose a risk to population centres if detonated, diverted, stolen or released in some other fashion.

 

Armstrong noted that the guidelines will be issued in proposed form because they must still be approved by the White House office of management and budget (OMB) before they can be made final.  However, she said, the department wanted to get the guidelines in circulation as soon as possible rather than waiting for the 90-day OMB clearance process.

 

Between September and the end of December this year, the 7,000 facilities must prepare security vulnerability assessments for the department’s approval.  The guidelines are meant to assist plant operators in making those assessments and in implementing more robust security measures subject to department approval early in 2009.

 

Some 350 chemical industry executives are attending the three-day security summit, sponsored by the department and the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA).

 

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By: Joe Kamalick
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