Reader Question – 10-07-09 – Top Screen

One of the interesting things about my blog is that I have a steady flow of new readers stumbling onto old postings through their internet search engines looking for information on CFATS. Today our good friend Anonymous left a question on an old blog posting from December 2007. Anonymous writes: “Do you have any information on the way DHS is ranking facilities meeting these Mission Critical and Economically Significant criteria?” As best I can tell DHS is not currently using the information from the ‘Mission Critical’ and ‘Economically Significant’ Top Screen questions for determining if a facility will be preliminarily tiered as a high risk facility. I base this on the fact that there are no ‘follow-up’ questions of these chemicals in either the SVA or SSP. I seem to recall reading an article some where last year (and I can’t find it in my records) that said that DHS did not intend to directly use the information collected in these portions of the Top Screen for immediate enforcement efforts under CFATS. It seems that they are using these questions to collect information on these types of chemicals to see how they might attempt to include them in future risk determinations. If someone has more recent information on this topic, please let me know.