National Dialogue Closed

Friday was the last day for public participation in the National Dialogue on Preparedness. It is now up to the DHS Local, State, Tribal, and Federal Preparedness Task Force to review the Ideas presented, decide which ones to try to implement and complete the implementation process. The set-up of the web site indicates that the Task Force will keep the public up to date on the progress in this area. I’ll keep watching to see how well that goes and how much detail will be provided in the process.

There have been a total of 266 Ideas submitted to the Dialogue. A total of 869 registered users have posted 420 comments on those Ideas and voted a total of 3,297 times. During the last five days of the Dialogue we had a nice surge of participation; 148 new participants, 39 new Ideas, and 55 new comments.

Throughout the Dialogue I have tracked those Ideas that I thought would be of interest to the chemical security community. In the last five days of the Dialogue there hasn’t been much change in the status of these Ideas and the same ones that were identified as ‘Hot’ ideas on Monday finished up with that designation; though it still isn’t clear what that means. Here is the final status of these Ideas (once again I submitted Ideas 2, 3, 4, and 7).

● FEMA CBRNE Preparedness Division (5 votes, 0 comments, rank 98) - Hot
● Funding Post-Emergency Response Research (6 vote, 0 comments, rank 87) - Hot
● Update "pre-fire" tours to include "pre-hazmat" considerations (9 votes, 0 comments, rank 65) - Hot
● HAZMAT Rail Shipment Notifications (-4 vote, 0 comments, rank 252)
● TSA Chlorine Dispersion Modeling Study (0 votes, 1 positive comment, rank 278)
● Bring in the Military (-13 votes, 4 positive comments, rank 265)
● Counter-Terrorism Emergency Response Plan - CFATS (11 votes, 0 comments, rank 45)