ISCD Announces East Regional Meeting

This weekend the DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) announced on the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) landing page that the East DHSChemSecurityTalk would be held in Philadelphia on August 2^nd. This will be the last of the three regional DHSChemSecurityTalks held this year. The first was held last week in Oakland, CA and the second will be held on July 19^th in Chicago, IL.

Additional information and links to the registration site can be found on the DHSChemSecurityTalks web page. The agenda for the East meeting is very nearly the same as the agendas for both the West and Mid meetings. As I mentioned for the Mid meeting, there is one presentation that has been changed; instead of the “DHS Soft Target Security” presentation that will be seen in Chicago, DHS will present “Countering Malicious Use of Drones” in Philadelphia.

Commentary

When ISCD initially announced these regional meetings, I wondered if they were going to supplant the annual Chemical Sector Security Summit. Last year that meeting was moved to Houston and that looked to be a move to re-energize the meeting which had seen a gradual decline in attendance over the last couple of years. And in February ISCD announced that planning was underway for the ‘biennial’ CSSS in 2019 a much-overlooked change in the CSSS program.

In many ways regional programs make more sense than a big CSSS. It changes to a one-day event which may be easier to squeeze into a corporate schedule and many of the presentations can be tailored to specific regional concerns. Unfortunately, it also reduces the number of scope of the presentations made and would seem to remove the vendor side show aspect of the CSSS.

The major draw back to these regional meetings for many folks, however, will be the backwards step in the removal of the web cast of the presentations. There are too many folks, particularly at smaller facilities, that will just not have the travel budget to attend even these regional meetings. This is why I lobbied so hard to have many of the presentations at the CSSS web cast.

I understand that presenting web casts of the presentations for these regional events might detract from attendance at the later regional meetings. That is why I was hoping to see a notice that the East regional meeting (the last in the series) would include provisions for registration for web casts. It does not. I think that this is a major step backwards for the CFATS outreach program.

It will be interesting to see if ISCD publishes the slide presentations from these regional meetings on the DHSChemSecurityTalks. While the slides are not nearly as informative as the actual presentations, they do provide a way for expanding the audience to folks who could not attend the meetings. They also provided a way for individual who do attend to bring back the information to their co-workers who are also vital players in the CFATS process.

On a slightly different point. DHS also completed their apparently ‘monthly’ tweak to many of the pages on their CFATS web site. I did not see any major new information that was worth discussing, but there was something disturbingly missing. Last month ISCD rolled out a number of Spanish language versions of some of their outreach documents. Unfortunately, there are no links to any of those documents on the CFATS web site.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I do not really see a wide spread need for many of those fact sheets, but the Spanish language version ‘Report a CFATS Violation Flyer’ is one that certainly needs more emphasis given the increasing numbers of Spanish speakers in the industrial workforce. The failure to include a link to that on the Report a Potential CFATS Violation page (which to be fair was not updated) or the page for the actual flyer which was updated) is a mistake that needs to be corrected. And if it was important enough for ISCD to  produce the other Spanish flyers, then they should have also have had their links included in the respective pages of the CFATS web site.