There was large chemical fire early this week in Spokane, WA; this one was at a fuel and oil distribution company. Like the Barton Solvents fire in Kansas, this involved storage tanks of flammable liquids and it did not result in any deaths or serious injuries. Unfortunately, the damage in the Spokane fire did spread beyond the distributor’s site with serious damage to adjacent businesses. Again, because tanks were not filled (two were in fact empty for maintenance), the fire was not as bad as it could have been.
While the fire was not completely out yesterday, local investigators had determined that the fire looks like it had been intentionally set. The Spokane fire department has called in the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to help in the investigation. If this was deliberately set, and depending on the motivation of the person or people responsible, this could be described as a terrorist attack. A big “if” and an equally large “depending”, but we will have to wait and see what the investigation turns up.
The initial investigations tend to show that the fire started at a fuel tanker that was parked on the site. A small bomb placed in a 4,000 to 6,000 gallon tank truck of flammable liquid is an ideal way to initiate an attack on a chemical facility. The explosion would spread burning liquid over a large area and one could expect to get secondary effects like apparently happened in this case. Only good perimeter security and internal barriers are going to be able to prevent a successful attack by this means.
Once again, it is not clear that this facility would have been covered under the new Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) regulations. While gasoline and its common chemical cousins are not listed in the proposed Appendix A, DHS Chemicals of Interest, to that regulation (and thus not generically required to complete the Top Screen process), the current Top Screen in the DHS Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT) has specific provisions for refineries. While most refineries may be expected to have other chemicals on site that are covered under the proposed Appendix A, this may indicate that DHS intends to specifically notify refineries and fuel distributors to complete the Top Screen that DHS will use to determine if a chemical facility is a high risk facility and thus covered under the regulation. That would be the only way that, as currently written, this facility would be brought under the new security regulations.
As I have mentioned in a number of different forums, the failure to include generic hazardous chemicals (flammable liquids, toxic liquids, etc) in the list of chemicals requiring companies to provide Top Screen information provides a large number of essentially unsecured terrorist targets to dot the landscape. We will just have to wait and see what the revised Appendix A looks like when it is ultimately issued in its final version. Unfortunately, there is no telling when that will be.
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