CSSS Reports

Well we are starting to see some reports about what went on at the Chemical Sector Security Summit last week. Earlier today the Roberts Law Group posted what appears to be the first of three blogs about the CSSS on their Homeland Security Law and Policy Blog. This short post looks at some of the numbers reported by DHS on the current status of the CFATS program. Reporting the Numbers Three important numbers here; 4110 final tiering letters sent, 887 yet to be sent, and 47 facilities that have had their initial inspections completed. The first two show that significant progress has been made on the reviews of Security Vulnerability Assessments. As we would expect, most of the ‘to be reviewed’ facilities are Tier 4 facilities and I would assume that the Tier 1 and 2 facilities in the ‘yet to be reviewed’ column were late entries. The number of inspections does not surprise me. As I have mentioned before these inspections have got to be time consuming and personnel intensive. This combined with the small inspection force means that the inspections will take time. The Roberts’ blog notes that DHS is “expected to increase PAIs to 30-40 per month” as 100 additional inspectors are added (an almost 60% increase in available inspectors). This will also be improved as the current inspectors get more proficient at conducting inspections and compiling reports (any skill gets better with practice). Also we would presume that generally speaking the chemical plants being inspected will be getting generally smaller and less complex as we move further down the Tier rankings (not always, of course, but generally speaking). More Information to Come I expect that we will be seeing more blog reports on the Summit in the coming days and weeks. The folks at SOCMA (co-sponsors of the Summit) have promised that they will be providing more information on their web site. If the previous Summits are any preview, we can expect DHS to publish copies of many of the slide presentations on the Summit Web Site in the coming weeks. I’m still hoping that they will expand that this year to videos of at least some of the presentations. I’ll certainly point out any information sources that I come across. In fact, bloggers feel free to let me know as you post about the Summit and I’ll promise plugs here on this site. I would like to suggest to the folks at DHS that they have two in-house blogs that are woefully underwritten that could be used to address CSSS information. Maybe ISCD and the Chemical Sector Office could show the rest of the Department (apologies to the TSA blog folks) how to communicate with the public.