OCS Publishes CFATS Monthly Update – May 2021

 

The CISA Office for Chemical Security (OCS) recently updated the statistics on the CFATS Monthly Statistics page. This page provides information about the operations of the chemical security inspectors (CSI) for the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program, as well as the status of facilities covered under the program. The updated statistics are for the month of May.

CSI Operations

The table below shows the number of visits made by CSI to facilities in the program. The numbers show that the CSI force continues to work hard to support the CFATS program.

Inspection Data	Feb-21	Mar-21	Apr-21	May-21
Authorization Inspections	17	16	13	25
Compliance Inspections	97	93	128	133
Compliance Assistance	152	114	68	83
Compliance Audit	18	10	6	5

The number of Authorization Inspections continues it recent climb. We are not quite at a highpoint for the COVID-19 era, that was reached (30 inspections) last September. This reflects the continuing addition of new facilities as it is the final inspection where a site’s Site Security Plan (SSP) receives its final approval.

The number of compliance inspections last month reached a CE high (previous high was 131, also last September). We cannot read too much into that number, however, since it is more of a reflection of where the program was in the past; compliance inspections are the periodic re-inspection of a facility’s approved SSP. Actually, the compliance audit numbers should be combined with the CI total, since the CA’s are actually remote compliance inspections instituted in response to the pandemic. If you did combine the two, the September 2020 numbers would be much higher (154).

Facility Status

The table below shows the continued status of facilities within the program. The number of facilities in the program continues to remain generally steady with a slight increase for the start of this month.

Facility Status	Feb-21	Mar-21	Apr-21	May-21
Tiered	100	86	103	108
Authorized	153	139	145	143
Approved	3027	3057	3034	3039
Total	3280	3282	3282	3290

This period of four consecutive months without a net reduction in covered facilities is pretty unusual. I can only find one other period (March thru June 2019) where we saw a similar consistency in the number of covered facilities, with numbers hovering around 3323 facilities. The variation in the number of ‘Approved’ facilities shows that the program continues to lose a small number of facilities, but the influx of new facilities continues to more than make up for those losses.