Chemical Facility Security News

DHS published a notice in today’s Federal Register announcing the designation of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan Critical Manufacturing Sector. This new sector joins the current 17 Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR) in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).

The Critical Manufacturing Sector was added to the NIPP because it "includes systems and operations that, if attacked or disrupted, would cause major interruptions to the essential functions of one or more other CIKR sectors and result in national-level impacts." Initially four industry systems are being included in this sector. They are:

• Primary Metal Manufacturing
• Machinery Manufacturing
• Electrical Equipment, Appliance, and Manufacturing.
• Transportation Manufacturing.

The criteria for the selection of the original 17 sectors were significantly different. Those criteria identified sectors whose failure or disruption could cause one or more of the following:

• A large number of fatalities,
• Significant first year national economic impact,
• Mass evacuations with prolonged absences of six or more months, or
• A loss of governance or mission execution that disrupts multiple regions or critical infrastructure sectors for more than one week resulting in loss of necessary services to the public.

The proposed Critical Manufacturing Sector does not include any chemical manufacturing components because there is already a Chemical Sector among the original 17. All four of these industry systems provide support to the chemical manufacturing industry. Unfortunately, in describing the elements of these industry systems there was no mention of two elements that are critical to the operation of the Chemical Sector,

• Chemical Piping under Machinery Manufacturing
• Chemical Control Systems under Electrical Equipment, Appliance and Manufacturing

Written comments on this new CIKR sector are being accepted through May 10th under docket number DHS-2008-0038.

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