Chemical Sector Security Summit Update

Earlier this week the DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection updated the 2009 Chemical Sector Security Summit web page. The new page reflects the fact that the 2009 Summit was successfully held earlier this summer. It also provides a link to a new web page containing a listing of the various DHS presentations that were made at this year’s summit. That listing provides links to a .PDF version of the slides used in the presentations. I’ve only had a chance to quickly glance through each of the slide shows, but there is certainly a great deal of interesting information contained in the presentations. I’ll prepare a more detailed listing of the interesting stuff, but for right now here are the presentations that are available: Ammonium Nitrate Regulations Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Overview Chemical-terrorism Vulnerability Update Site Security Plan Development and Inspections Site Security Plan Theft & Diversion: Prevention and Compliance Voluntary Practices and Industry Practices On a special note, it looks like the Site Security Plan presentation is the same set of slides used in the webinar I reported on last month. I was a little disappointed to see only DHS presentations on the page for this year’s summit. Last year DHS did post one private sector presentation. As I noted in last year’s blog on the same topic I suspect that the copy write issues may be responsible for the government only postings. Copies of some of the private sector presentations would certainly provide a clearer picture of the information shared at the summit. Once again, I must warn the reader that the presentations listed above are actually only the Power Point® slides for the presentations. This means that the information is abbreviated. There are also some acronyms used in the slides that were surely explained in the oral presentation, but are now just collections of letters. I’ll see if I can get some explanation for some of the more arcane acronyms. I made the point last year that I thought that DHS should consider web casting these presentations. It would certainly make them available to a much wider audience. They did not get around to doing that this year. Maybe next year the Secretary’s public outreach program through the web will extend to web casting at least the department presentations. On major improvement over last year can be seen in the drastically shorter time to get these documents posted to the web site. Last year it was September 15th before the presentations were up on the web site. This year it was August 4th; much better.