Chemical plant safetyHouse panel cuts DHS chemical plant monitoring program’s budget
Budget authors in the House proposed cutting almost $9 million from what DHS had requested for high-risk chemical tracking in the 2014 fiscal year. The House Appropriations Committee, indicating its lack of confidence in DHS’s oversight of fertilizer plants like Texas’s West Fertilizer Company, which exploded earlier this year, also withheld $20 million from the program until DHS responded in detail to questions the committee sent the department.
Budget authors in the House proposed cutting almost $9 million from what DHS had requested for high-risk chemical tracking in the 2014 fiscal year. The House Appropriations Committee, indicating its lack of confidence in DHS’s oversight of fertilizer plants like Texas’s West Fertilizer Company, which exploded earlier this year, also withheld $20 million from the program until DHS responded in detail to questions the committee sent the department.
TheDallas News reports that in 2007, a chemical plant safety bill made DHS responsible for monitoring the security policies of chemical facilities. In 2008 the department was given the authority to track the purchase and selling of ammonium nitrate.
Ammonium nitrate, which Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing, is a crop fertilizer, and it was the chemical that ignited in the in the 17 April explosion of the West Fertilizer plant.
The House committee’s budget proposal was accompanied by a report which said DHS has made “only marginal progress in carrying out its regulatory responsibilities.” The report also said that DHS’ National Protection and Programs Directorate “has failed to fully implement” the ammonium nitrate tracking, which is still in the rule-making and public comment process.
In the past year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the DHS inspector general have reported on the ineffectiveness of the agency’s high-risk chemical facility monitoring program.
The report also said that DHS had no knowledge the West Fertilizer Company was storing a large amount of ammonium nitrate beyond the 400-pound amount requiring oversight. Facilities are responsible for notifying DHS if their ammonium nitrate inventory exceeds certain amounts.
Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, questioned the department’s chemical plant oversight in a letter to DHS secretary Janet Napolitano. In the letter McCaul asks whether a more effective program would have “helped mitigate the disaster at West Fertilizer in any way?”
“The explosion of the West Fertilizer plant is a terrible tragedy, no matter what the cause,” McCaul wrote. “But had the event been the result of terrorist infiltration, how could DHS possibly justify the investment of resources the department has made over the past 5 years to implement CFATS when it didn’t even know of this plant’s existence?”
