White House endorses water facility security, says Rand Beers
The Obama administration supports consideration of inherently safer technology (IST) for chemical facility security standards and the extension of those standards to water and wastewater facilities, the top infrastructure protection official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified Wednesday.
Rand Beers, undersecretary for National Protection and Programs, addressed the need to reauthorize the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) administered by DHS and due to expire at the end of this fiscal year.
He called upon the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for a permanent of authorization to the program, even if no changes were made to it, as it has worked well to strengthen chemical facility security.
Indeed, the Obama administration would submit suggested legislation on how to extend CFATS to include provisions on inherently safer technology (IST) and water and wastewater facilities within several months, Beers predicted.
"The administration believes that flexibility and staggered implementation would be required in implementing in any new IST policy should Congress choose to enact one," Beers testified.
DHS supports providing its regulators with the ability to require high-risk facilities to adopt inherently safer technology if it becomes the best or only way to ensure security at a chemical facility, Beers said. Inherently safer technology methods seek to replace chemical engineering processes at plants with chemicals that might be less toxic to people or the environment and thus make a facility less attractive as a terrorist target.
But the administration would not blindly endorse inherently safer technology, Beers cautioned. DHS would consider the economic impact, the timeframe, and any conflicts with public health or environmental requirements in doing so.
DHS would never enter into a case it would say, "Gee, we've discovered this inherently safer technology and now you must go ahead and do it," Beers vowed.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the committee, endorsed taking a look at how to best make inherently safer technology part of the chemical facility security regime, but Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking member, vehemently opposed the idea.
"An IST mandate may actually increase or unacceptably transfer risk to other points in the chemical process or elsewhere in the supply chain," Collins declared.
In addition, experts have no common understanding of what inherently safer technology actually requires, Collins argued. Beers responded that DHS would work with industry to establish a consensus for the purposes of the law.
In her protest of IST requirements, Collins pointed to how many drinking water utilities rely upon chlorine to treat their water. The utilities make water treatment decisions based on climate, geography, and the water source, as well as the size and location of the utilities facilities and the risk and benefits of using chlorine compared to other treatment options.
"According to one water utility located in an isolated area of the Northwest, if Congress were to force it to replace its use of gaseous chlorine with sodium hypochlorite, then the utility would have to use as much as seven times the current quantity of treatment chemicals to achieve comparable water quality results," Collins recounted. "In turn, the utility would have to arrange for many more bulk chemical deliveries, by trucks, into the watershed. The greater quantities of chemicals and increased frequency of truck deliveries would heighten the risk of an accident resulting in a chemical spill into the watershed. In fact, the accidental release of sodium hypochlorite into the watershed would likely cause greater harm to soils, vegetation and streams than a gaseous chlorine release in this remote area."
Moreover, the cost of complying with an IST mandate may force chemical companies to move their operations overseas at the loss of thousands of American jobs "at a time when we can hardly afford the loss of those jobs," Collins objected.
Last November, the House passed a CFATS reauthorization bill (HR 2868) that would provide DHS with the ability to mandate the use of inherently safer technology in high-risk chemical facilities. It also would create a parallel program at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the management of water and wastewater facility security. The bill has been referred to Lieberman's committee for consideration in the Senate.
By contrast, Collins has teamed up with several Republican and Democratic senators to introduce an alternative bill (S 2996), which would provide a five-year reauthorization of the existing CFATS rules.
The DHS fiscal 2011 budget proposal under consideration by Congress would extend CFATS through that year to allow lawmakers time to come up with a long-term or permanent authorization for the program.
"The department should be given reasonable deadlines by Congress to promulgate new rules to implement any new legislative requirements. CFATS, as currently being implemented, should remain in effect until they supplemented by new regulations," Beers commented.
|
Columns 
