Looking Back – 3-4-11 – Unusual Order Reporting

Nearly every morning I start my computer time by looking at information from Google about what happened in my blog in the previous 24 hours. Google, and blogspot.com is a Google service, provides interesting pieces of analytical data about my blog readership. One item of particular interest is the top ten blog posts each day. As you would expect, most of those posts were from the last couple of days, but with 16 years of publishing this blog, every once-in-a-while, a blog post from ancient history rises into that list. 

Today a blog post from March 2011 showed up on the list, “Unusual Order Reporting”. That post looked at a series of news stories about the preemption of a potential terrorist attack because of the reporting by both a chemical supply company and a transportation company about an order for a chemical by someone out of the ordinary; a chemical that can be used to make improvised explosive devices. 

Much of the discussion in the piece deals with the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program requirements for knowing your customers, especially when shipping chemical weapons, explosives, and precursors to both. While the shipping both chemical weapons and explosives remain regulated, with the death of the CFATS program in 2023, the regulation of precursor chemicals has disappeared from the federal arsenal. 

While I expect that most reputable chemical companies and distributors, especially those that were in the CFATS program, do make an honest effort to know their customers (and all the major industrial chemical organizations have programs that emphasize such efforts), such efforts cost time and money, and lose potential customers; corner cutting would not be unexpected. And, unfortunately, we do not have to look far (see yesterday’s post about this week’s CSB update) examples of chemical companies cutting major corners. 

CFATS is dead and buried. Someone is going to have to seriously think about what is going to cover the chemical security bases such as how to keep chemical weapon and improvised explosive precursors out of the hands of potential terrorists.