Looking Back – 12-1-2009

 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 December 1st, 2009, ‘Temporary Storage of Chlorine Railcars’, makes the list. It discusses the issue of storing a large number of chlorine railcars on a remote siding. The regulatory climate remains much the same, though the transportation security regulations have been expanded to include highly hazardous flammable trains. And, of course, the references to the CFATS regulations are no longer valid, since that program was discontinued due to inaction on the part of Congress. 

TSA Publishes 30-day ICR for Highway Base Program

Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published a 30-day information collection request (ICR) notice in the Federal Register (77 FR 71431) to support their new Highway Baseline Assessment for Security Enhancement (BASE) Program. This program will replace the TSA’s Highway Corporate Security Reviews.

According to today’s ICR notice the “TSA's Highway BASE program seeks to establish the current state of security gaps and implemented countermeasures throughout the highway mode of transportation by posing questions to major transportation asset owners and operators”. The TSA expects to conduct about 750 on-site assessments under this ICR on an annual basis with each assessment lasting about 3 hours.

The notice states that there were four comments filed on the earlier 60-day ICR notice (77 FR 3162), but since those comments were not solicited or filed via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov) there is no readily available source for reviewing those comments. This notice only informs us that:

“Two comments were unrelated to the ICR. The remaining two comments were requests for program information.”

According to the earlier 60-day notice the program will exclude “hazardous materials shippers and carriers as per agreement with U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)” (77 FR 31633). While the remaining trucking industry will be covered by the TSA security effort the most critical component from the point of view of the potential risk of chemical attacks on large segments of the population via terrorist attacks on HazMat shipments (anhydrous ammonia, or  chlorine for example). While I understand that DOT (federal and State) has many more inspectors, but TSA has primary responsibility (and supposedly the expertise) for transportation security, not DOT.

OMB needs to resolve this conflict of regulatory responsibility between DOT(PHMSA) and DHS(TSA). This ICR would be a good vehicle to initiate efforts to make DHS actually responsible for the security of HazMat transportation.