CHEMICAL SECURITY

Thousands of facilities across the country make or use large quantities of hazardous chemicals. Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there are no federal rules or security standards for these manufacturing companies, water-treatment plants and refineries. A bill, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, would for the first time require such facilities to assess their vulnerabilities and to develop security and response plans. This is a large first step in improving the safety of these facilities.

The most contentious part of the bill, which the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to consider today, is its handling of inherently safer technology. Environmental groups want the government to require companies to eliminate hazardous chemicals in favor of less toxic ones or safer manufacturing processes. Such a mandate would likely doom the bill to failure as the chemical industry already objects to the bill’s mere mention of the possibility of switching to safer technology or chemicals to meet its security requirements. A compromise may be to offer incentives, such as government-supported research of less hazardous alternatives.

After an explosion at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, killed 2,000 people in 1984, Congress passed the Community Right to Know Act, which required chemical facilities to report to the Environmental Protection Agency the amount of toxic chemicals they could have on site, how far the chemicals could travel if they were released and how many people lived within that radius. Simply because they had to report this information, many facilities began using smaller quantities of hazardous chemicals or eliminated them altogether.

According to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, this reporting has prompted 284 facilities in 47 states to switch to less hazardous processes or chemicals or to move to safer locations. As a result, at least 30 million people no longer live under the threat of a major toxic release from these facilities, which represent just a small fraction of those in the country.

The top reason companies gave for making such changes was concern about safety and accidental releases of chemicals. Concern about terrorism was the second motivation, followed by regulatory and legal requirements.

The report also noted that facilities reduced costs and regulatory burdens by switching to less hazardous chemicals or processes because they then needed fewer safety measures and could better focus on producing products and services.

Sen. Collins’ legislation, the Chemi-cal Anti-Terrorism Act, aims to build on this approach. Companies can choose how best to meet the bill’s security requirements by building better fences and hiring more security guards, for example, or by changing their chem-ical processes to reduce or eliminate the use of hazardous materials.

On another contentious issue, the bill maintains the rights of states to adopt and enforce more stringent chemical security requirements. This is appropriate, as is the bill’s approach to first require security plans from facilities that pose the most risk, based on their proximity to population centers, the toxicity of chemicals used and the potential harm to the economy if the facility were damaged.

This bill is a good beginning for the country’s first chemical security standards, which shouldn’t pre-empt state requirements and should push companies toward safer, less toxic processes.