Friday, March 24, 2006
Environmentalists And Homeland Security - A Bad Mix
This has been a political hot potato for very good reason. There is little doubt that chemical plants can pose a huge danger to the public - there is adequate evidence of that fact in the Bhopal disaster of some years ago. Because of that potential, such plants are a reasonable security issue. But it is not a simple picture in how to provide for that security.
Let's start with the politics first. The key phrase in the whole WaPo piece is
Democrats and environmental groups, however, contended that Chertoff was offering a fig leaf to an industry that has avoided regulation for four years. [emphasis added]Environmental groups are traditionally left-leaning and as such have been opposed to most security measures. Their motives in seeking to "secure" chemical plants are certainly mixed. They view chemical plants as "evil" and are obviously trying to use this issue as a lever to gain access to information about the plants that they think companies are somehow hiding.
Yet existing environmental regulation is so overbearing and so odious in some cases that there simply is little room for addtional oversight - particularly of the type that has been proposed to date.
In the wake of Bhopal, and because of environmental concern in general, chemical plants now operate with safeguards and back-ups and checks within checks, not unlike a nuclear plant. They are designed so that even catastrophic problems will be limited to the plant itself. Environmental regulation works very hard already to make sure that a chemical disaster is unlikely, and if it occurs, limited in scale and not some sort of WMD-in-waiting like Bhopal was.
Simply planting a bomb in most chemical plants would be disasterous for the plant, but it would not be a disaster for human life outside the plant, and it would be limited even therein. The true terror effects from such an event would likely be in interupttions of vital industrial material supplies since some plants represent a very significant portion of the total supply of some materials.
To really make a life-threatening terrorist target of a chemical plant one would have to have an intimate understanding of the plants workings and engineering. This means your really possible big attacks would either have to be inside jobs, or because someone with engineering knowledge got their hands on the plans.
So, your most effective security measures would be
- Careful screening of employees
- Tightly controlled permieter security
- Tight security on plant design and function information
The first two items there could use improvement, but both can be addressed without hugely intrusive government regulation. That third one is a bug-a-boo though.
You see, current environmental regulation makes much of plant design a matter of public record. A potential terrorist could easily get his hands on the information necessary to turn a chemical plant into a WMD-in-waiting, but that is not the plant's problem it's the problem of environmental regulation. The best thing that could be done to increase security at chemical plants is not incresed regulation, but repeal of some regulation.
But even with the information, execution of a suitable plan almost demands an inside job which the first two points would address.
The real problem is that with environmental groups using security as a lever to advance their agenda, they are retarding genuine and useful moves to increase security, and thus things have been legitimately stalled.
I have urged my cleintele to take the first two of the steps I have outlined above on a voluntary basis, and many have. They'd like to take the third, but current regulation prevents it.
Related Tags: homeland security, chemical plants, environmental groups
