US Agency No Longer Knows Who is Visiting Potentially Dangerous Chemicals Plants (bloomberg.com) 61
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, addresses the annual Chemical Security Summit in Arlington later this month, she'll be without a Big Stick she once wielded over the industry. Safeguarding the cybersecurity and physical security of 3,242 high-risk chemicals facilities across the country is one of CISA's critical responsibilities. Congress has renewed this authority, dubbed the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS), several times since enacting it in 2007. But on July 28, lawmakers for the first time allowed it to expire -- due in large part to the objections of a single senator. And there's no indication of when they might renew it after the Senate returns from recess in September.
As a result, the risk that terrorists could weaponize dangerous chemicals produced in some of these facilities has increased, according to a senior chemical security official with CISA, who requested anonymity in order to share sensitive details about the effects of the lapse. Some of the 322 most sensitive chemicals can be used to make bombs or be released as toxic clouds, according to the official, who added that a direct attack on a facility could cause an explosion comparable to a nuclear blast. That's not all. Without the CFATS rule, CISA also effectively has no idea who is visiting facilities or if they are stockpiling dangerous chemicals, according to the official. Until Congress renews the rule, the agency can't send inspectors to the 160 facilities they typically visit every month. The agency can also no longer enforce penalties on facilities that violate its safety standards. At least one high-risk facility that was paying the agency's $40,000-a-day fine for failing to redress concerns (after receiving a warning) has stopped paying, according to the official.
As a result, the risk that terrorists could weaponize dangerous chemicals produced in some of these facilities has increased, according to a senior chemical security official with CISA, who requested anonymity in order to share sensitive details about the effects of the lapse. Some of the 322 most sensitive chemicals can be used to make bombs or be released as toxic clouds, according to the official, who added that a direct attack on a facility could cause an explosion comparable to a nuclear blast. That's not all. Without the CFATS rule, CISA also effectively has no idea who is visiting facilities or if they are stockpiling dangerous chemicals, according to the official. Until Congress renews the rule, the agency can't send inspectors to the 160 facilities they typically visit every month. The agency can also no longer enforce penalties on facilities that violate its safety standards. At least one high-risk facility that was paying the agency's $40,000-a-day fine for failing to redress concerns (after receiving a warning) has stopped paying, according to the official.
Senate (Score:3)
"due in large part to the objections of a single senator"
Would that be the same senator who is holding up all the top promotions in the military?
Re:Senate (Score:5, Informative)
"due in large part to the objections of a single senator"
Would that be the same senator who is holding up all the top promotions in the military?
Nope:
FTFA - While the House of Representatives voted to extend CFATS by two years, the Senate failed to extend it after Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, blocked a vote. On the Senate floor, he said that while he supports chemical safeguards, he is concerned that the regulations’ renewal had been rushed. Lawmakers needed more information to determine their effectiveness and consider whether they impeded small businesses. His office didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFA - While the House of Representatives voted to extend CFATS by two years, the Senate failed to extend it after Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, blocked a vote. On the Senate floor, he said that while he supports chemical safeguards, he is concerned that the regulations’ renewal had been rushed. Lawmakers needed more information to determine their effectiveness and consider whether they impeded small businesses. His office didn’t reply to a request for comment.
My guess before reading this was that it was Rand Paul. Why?
1. He's opposed to everything that costs money. That's not a joke.
2. He's sort of opposed to everything, period. Also not a joke.
3. He gets a lot of personal satisfaction out of being "That Guy", the one who is always a dick.
Aren't we really way beyond the point where one senator should be able to stop anything? Why isn't that stopped?
Re: (Score:2)
At least one high-risk facility that was paying the agency's $40,000-a-day fine for failing to redress concerns (after receiving a warning) has stopped paying, according to the official.
Whereas buying Rand Paul, a known contrarian who'd vote against anything just because he can, would have cost them a lot less than $40k/day.
OK sounds reasonable (Score:2, Insightful)
Are we supposed to allow infinite government intrusion just because of terrorism fears? Thanks to this idiocy the days of being able to fly visa-free to most of the world are about to end -- the US ended it for foreigners in the W era and Europe is finally doing tit-for-tat in a few months. Because it's not like the countries get passenger manifests from the airlines (wait, they do). It's needless assholery. Also the whole thing about taking off shoes to get on an airplane. Rand Paul should get a fuckin med
Re: OK sounds reasonable (Score:1)
The logical reason to continue all of the "chemical plant inspection programs" is the kabooms that happen every few years. Expect more :-(
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If there is a logical reason to continue all of the chemical plant inspection programs then they can show the evidence
A GAO study was already requested. Why not wait for the answers instead of immediately ending the program that allows industry to check whether the employees/contractors/visitors getting access to their most sensitive sites are on the terrorist watch list?
Re: (Score:2)
"due in large part to the objections of a single senator"
Would that be the same senator who is holding up all the top promotions in the military?
Nope. According to TFA, it's Senator Rand Paul (R-KY):
While the House of Representatives voted to extend CFATS by two years, the Senate failed to extend it after Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, blocked a vote. On the Senate floor, he said that while he supports chemical safeguards, he is concerned that the regulations’ renewal had been rushed. Lawmakers needed more information to determine their effectiveness and consider whether they impeded small businesses. His office didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Re:Senate (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do Republicans disproportionately believe health misinformation? [washingtonpost.com] Republicans had significantly higher Covid-19 death rates.
No OB-GYNs left in town: what came after Idaho’s assault on abortion [theguardian.com] OB-GYN doctors are leaving Idaho because of deranged health care laws. Doctors and hospitals are hesitant to perform procedures on pregnant women because they don't want to face criminal charges. Without access to healthcare women's lives are at risk.
Jr-15, a small assault rifle marketed to children [businessinsider.com]
What could possibly go wrong?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't get what your objection to this is...?
I think it is great to teach children from a young age firearms safety and to respect the danger that they present.
I grew up with guns in my house, and my parents and grandparents took me shooting when I was old enough.
I remember plinking with a .22 on my grandfathers farmland....
And my dad would take me out to shoot a .380 semi-auto, etc......
I knew where
Re: (Score:2)
Because you're an outlier. And it's not the outliers causing the problems. If we could structure a society around "what would the outliers do" then we wouldn't be having these discussions.
Re: (Score:1)
You've flipped this. He's not the outlier. The children who use guns inappropriately are the outliers.
Unfortunately, it is these outliers we have to protect against.
Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
So, as someone who has worked a couple decades in infrastructure, if the public knew how dangerous things they are surrounded by every day actually are they would be paralyzed by fear and voting themselves back into the stone age.
Water plants keep ton cylinders of chlorine gas and anhydrous ammonia, most chemicals used in industry are flammable, corrosive or otherwise toxic. Even something seemingly innocuous like paint production requires extremely strong solvents and volatile organic compounds that are de
Re: (Score:3)
No one really wants to know for real but we all see the chemical tankers on the highways with the giant warning signs and every so often a train derails and an entire town gets sick, so it isn't a total secret, either. Mostly out of sight, mostly out of mind.
As bad as the commercial industry is, you _might_ be a little shocked at some of the crazy shit going on at government facilities. I worked one for a few years and visited others here n there... some of that shit was super eye popping. Some of it jus
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Ridiculous (Score:2)
Similar experience, in fact, at military facilities, stuff that would never be allowed outside the government. Chrome plating facility we did some work at had craters in the concrete all over the place where the pneumatic piston pumps would blow their tubing off and spray into the open room. Same place, they had a "chemical storage room" where they just kept bags of cyanide pellets, chromate and other noxious stuff just sitting in stalls like a cattle barn. Crazy and scary.
Re: (Score:3)
I was at a weapons lab so I can't get into it but anything you can imagine was probably going on and other things as well. *cough*
Totally different world, as you seem well aware already. Civilians would fucking freak out.
Re: Ridiculous (Score:2)
One could argue we're getting the best government(for big business) that we(big business and the ultra- wealthy) can buy.
What's the problem here? Y'all don't have a home out somewhere nice with a panic room in it? Lol plebs. Don't you know only the strong(rich) survive?
I'm sure I'm just "jealous" though. Doesn't everyone want to flippantly poison the air and water, pump the lakes dry to sell at a profit(after ensuring municipal water sources are toxic of course).? No? Why not? You could be even richer than
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It would seem that if a company has dangerous chemicals, they should be closely monitored to prevent accidents and misuse. I doubt that companies will do a good job of policing themselves (because "freedumb"... it would cost them profits).
Rand Paul is just a shill of big business profits.
Re: (Score:2)
The US Chemical Safety Board has a YouTube channel where they talk about some of the accidents they've investigated. (https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB)
The rate of accidents is surprisingly low, and most chemical facilities compare share knowledge and experience with peers to prevent accidents. The CSB's videos call out examples of when that doesn't happen, and the consequences.
Re: (Score:2)
We pump dozens of sticks of dynamite worth of explosive power into a gas tank we haul around behind us every day.
Think that's bad? Wait until you see a lithium battery fire. Burns hot enough to melt right through steel and concrete. Contains it's own oxidizer, so can't be put out with water. Since it requires so many batteries to make decent range, most people are literally sitting right on top of a huge pile of lithium batteries in their EV.
There are over 170,000 car fires each year in the US, just from ICE vehicles. That's hundreds every day. While I see your point, right now EV can't even hold a candle to that harm at ~25 fires per year. Rather ironic that hybrid vehicles catch fire 140x more often than EV vehicles do, and twice as often as ICE cars. Seems the solution in the middle, is quite a self-destructive one.
https://www.carsdover.com/elec... [carsdover.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The semiconductor manufacturing industry practically lives on HF acid, it's utterly irreplaceable. They also know how to take proper precautions with it, and understand mitigations in case of accidents.
I regularly use 12% sodium hypochlorite in my swimming pool.
Almost all of us use a chemical that is cancerous, poisonous, and is so volatile that if you vaporize a 17 gallons of it, it's equivalent in explosive power to half a ton of TNT. By the way, 17 gallons is what it takes to fill my gas tank.
Lots of s
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of stuff is dangerous, but you just have to understand how to use it safely.
Spend 15 minutes outside of a busy gas station and you'll quickly realize the only reason a lot of people are still alive is purely that they are lucky. Filling gas cans in truck beds. Not paying attention to the nozzle. Getting back in the car while it's filling. Not shutting the car off while filling. I haven't seen anyone smoking in a while, but I have absolutely witnessed it. It's a small miracle more people don't uninteintionally-self-immolate.
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Or perhaps the risks are overstated?
If people are able to do these supposedly dangerous activities frequently and without incident, maybe they aren't as dangerous as you've been led to believe.
Maybe, the warnings are just a bunch of CYA, because some idiot, somewhere, found a way to set himself on fire whilst filling a gas tank in a slightly unconventional manner.
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That's what's interesting. It's pretty common to use sodium hypochlorite, then a little hydrochloric acid to compensate for the pH rise. My pH doesn't rise, all summer. If anything it used to fall after rain, and I'd have to add borax or washing soda. This year the pH has been stable all summer after initial setup. I guess acid rain is getting cleaned up.
Re: (Score:2)
So, as someone who has worked a couple decades in infrastructure, if the public knew how dangerous things they are surrounded by every day actually are they would be paralyzed by fear and voting themselves back into the stone age.
Water plants keep ton cylinders of chlorine gas and anhydrous ammonia, most chemicals used in industry are flammable, corrosive or otherwise toxic. Even something seemingly innocuous like paint production requires extremely strong solvents and volatile organic compounds that are deadly.
Soap production requires concentrated lye, gasoline and diesel refining requires HF acid, so corrosive it can etch glass.
Any number of base chemicals can easily be turned into hazards, trying to police thousands of individual sites is an exercise in futility and foolishness.
So we should not even try?
Re: Ridiculous (Score:2)
There are existing frameworks that dictate safety for these facilities, the Chemical Safety Board being a well known one whose website anyone with a little intellectual curiosity should visit, some really interesting stuff there. So it's not that we shouldn't try, it's that once again if we simply enforced the rules that already exist it would take care of 95% of the problem.
The government suffers from a terminal case of "must do something-itis" where rather than make existing things work they always want t
Re: (Score:2)
There are existing frameworks that dictate safety for these facilities, the Chemical Safety Board being a well known one whose website anyone with a little intellectual curiosity should visit, some really interesting stuff there. So it's not that we shouldn't try, it's that once again if we simply enforced the rules that already exist it would take care of 95% of the problem.
The government suffers from a terminal case of "must do something-itis" where rather than make existing things work they always want to create new wasteful agencies that will also not do their jobs.
Ok. I'll buy that.
Mod Parent Insightful.
Re: (Score:2)
Any number of base chemicals can easily be turned into hazards, trying to police thousands of individual sites is an exercise in futility and foolishness.
Yup, which is why it should never be done. Far better to let the companies spend the money to police themselves. After all, what [wikipedia.org] could [tpr.org] possibly go wrong [texastribune.org]?
Re: Ridiculous (Score:1)
These industries are already policed by agencies which would work well enough if they just did their jobs. Additionally, it's hard to explain unless you've worked in these industries, but circumstances which lead to accidents are often very complex situations where there are multiple failures that almost nobody would have predicted, at least nobody would have reasonably expected designers to foresee.
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Gasoline has a higher energy than dynamite, and the stuff for a house-leveling dust explosion is in most kitchens too.
We can't let that paralyze us with fear; It would interfere with making the paperclips.
Make it a standalone agency. (Score:2)
"... At least one high-risk facility that was paying the agency's $40,000-a-day fine for failing to redress concerns (after receiving a warning) has stopped paying, according to the official."
What's the budget for the overall auditing function? If my math is correct, they were bringing in over $14 million/year from this ONE customer. How much do you need to address the excuses of not auditing? With those kinds of fines, one would think they don't really need taxpayer money. Or a senators approval.
Re: (Score:1)
Perrenial troll geekmux blathered:
"... At least one high-risk facility that was paying the agency's $40,000-a-day fine for failing to redress concerns (after receiving a warning) has stopped paying, according to the official."
What's the budget for the overall auditing function? If my math is correct, they were bringing in over $14 million/year from this ONE customer. How much do you need to address the excuses of not auditing? With those kinds of fines, one would think they don't really need taxpayer money. Or a senators approval.
The agency doesn't get to keep those fines itself. They go into the Federal general fund.
Also, the agency's funding was not the only thing that expired with the authorization that Rand Paul blocked. Its authority to conduct those inspections and audits also expired.
Like most Americans, you know nothing about fund-based accounting, which is what dictates how the budgets of government bodies from the Federal to the local level are allocated - and, equally importantly, how the
Rand Paul (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Tuberville (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess what. Every candidate factors in the Electoral College when running. Get rid of it and something else will take it's place. Something that in 10 years will have people screaming "Foo is the source of all our problems";
Me? I'd ban gerrymandering. Make a list of every address and how many voters live there. Nothing else. No age, ethnicity, salary, etc. Just "a voter lives here". Feed a computer a rough map and this list and let it grind out districts. It's algorithm is to pick a center and grow outward, paying attention to things like rivers, freeways, and other things that divide neighborhoods.
IMHO, just doing that will end a good percentage of the shenanigans politicians pull
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes, the old "The Electoral College is the source of all our problems" argument.
Guess what. Every candidate factors in the Electoral College when running. Get rid of it and something else will take it's place. Something that in 10 years will have people screaming "Foo is the source of all our problems";
Me? I'd ban gerrymandering. Make a list of every address and how many voters live there. Nothing else. No age, ethnicity, salary, etc. Just "a voter lives here". Feed a computer a rough map and this list and let it grind out districts.
It's algorithm is to pick a center and grow outward, paying attention to things like rivers, freeways, and other things that divide neighborhoods.
IMHO, just doing that will end a good percentage of the shenanigans politicians pull
We can get rid of both the useless Electrical Collage and the absolutely-designed-for-corruption Gerrymandering horseshit that maybe we can have some political sanity for a few generations.
Re:Tuberville (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The Electoral College was part of the current US constitution from the beginning, which was well before the civil war.
So was the concept of enslaved African Americans being worth less in the Census than whites; or that only men could vote.
But we eventually corrected those mistakes when they became entirely anachronistic and actually harmful.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Man this guy is dumb as a post, along with a majority of the elected right wing officials. We need to establish a base criteria of knowledge that someone needs to meet before becoming a Senator or Representative. Being ruled by a minority of uneducated, unsophisticated individuals in government and the electorate due to gerrymandering will not serve the US well going forward. Time to get rid of laws like the Electoral College enacted after the Civil War to appease southerners, it has only led to the fall of the US. Let's truly make America great again by purely popular vote, no fool Republican will ever win again.
Yeah, in this day and age, the electrical collage is not only unnecessary, it is downright dangerous!
Far too easy to corrupt. You simply can't buy 300 million votes; but 270. . .?
Re: (Score:2)
You simply can't buy 300 million votes
Billionaires: "Challenge accepted."
Re: (Score:2)
Time to get rid of laws like the Electoral College enacted after the Civil War
The electoral college was originally defined in the US Constitution, which was ratified in 1788 and put into effect in 1789, roughly 3/4 of a century before the Civil War ended. You can find it spelled out plainly in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 [wikipedia.org].
But perhaps you're confused because the electoral college was later amended by the 12th Amendment [wikipedia.org]? Except that the 12th Amendment was ratified and took effect in 1804, which is at least 60 years earlier than you were suggesting. And it was designed to address iss
Sounds like another bullshit agency (Score:1)
Using terrorists and fear in your funding appeals isn't really a winning formula. I'm sure the lack of "events" is used as a measure of how successful the act is. But - before 2007 were there any cases of terrorists accessing these facilities? From what I understand the vast majority of terrorists have bought their ANFO and box cutters retail.
470 industrial chemical accidents since 2020 (Score:4, Informative)
Not suprising this is a risk (Score:1)
Safeguarding the cybersecurity of chemical plants (Score:1)
One senator (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This whole business of one senator being able to hold up action by the entire Senate needs to go. There is no constitutional justification for it, and it is totally undemocratic. The Senate needs to get its act together and correct its rules of conduct.
I don't know how it is even possible.
Re: One senator (Score:2)
Filibuster. A stupid rule with a stupid name. I believe we got it from Roman law.