Request a CFATS Presentation Page

About a week ago I did a posting about a CFATS Brochure (see: “CFATS Brochure”). In that blog I noted that DHS had added a “Request a CFATS Presentation” link on their Chemical Security web page. Well, when that page was changed yesterday, the link changed from a ‘mailto’ link to an actual link to a new web page. Well, I missed that change until I got a web page change email from the GovDelivery.Com people notifying me of the latest change on the Chemical Security Web Page. The new page has no reference to the brochure that I described in the earlier blog. That is a shame since that was a well produced PR type publication. It appears that that brochure is no longer available, at least on the web site. What the new page does have is a description of a DHS ‘request a speaker’ program. It provides a mechanism to request a DHS speaker to come talk to your group about CFATS issues. It provides a list of questions that DHS would like answered about the group and venue to aid in their speaker allocation process. They say that they will respond to requests within about two weeks, so you need to get your requests in early. This is a relatively low tech ‘mechanism’. They provide an email address (the CFATS@DHS.Gov address that goes to those friendly Help Desk people) and want you to paste that into your email program. For the text of the message they would like you to paste in the questions and then provide the answers before sending your email. DHS certainly has the programming personnel to develop a higher tech version of this request, but they are probably working on something else; like maybe the SSP format or registration tools for the long awaited ammonium nitrate program. I know, this small tool should be much more important than that stuff.