ReRoute NOW

House Subcommittee Hearing on HR 5533 and HR 5577 :  I hope that you, as one conscientiously interested in improving facility security and helping your readers understand the choices, and perhaps interested in mandating consideration of IST, will push hard to get (maybe through FOIA?), make publicly available on your blog, and analyze the key documents involved in the decision of the LA Water Dept  to keep using chlorine gas instead of switching to a non-disaster chemical as the Washington DC Blue Plains sewage treatment plant [after the 9/11 attacks] and scores of others nationwide have done. 

That kind of hard-headed, data-driven (vs. faith-based) and democratic approach by you would above all provide a useful test case of how the current facility security approach (supported by Bush Administration and Republicans) works.  The current approach leaves all major decisions about facility disaster risk in the hands of corporate management, whom one might just suspect would be biased towards their hidebound business-as-usual decisions that have kept communities at enormous risk for decades.  The approach does not require even consideration of safer technologies much less adoption of these when available, and certainly does not involve "alarming the public" about the consequences of various major available technologies so they might decide what risks, costs, and benefits to accept.  

OR:  You might take an opposite approach.  You might support a facility security approach like that currently imposed by the new rail hazmat security pretend-"routing" regulations from US DOT (effective June 1, 2008):  these rules let the corporate handler of disaster chemicals (in this case the railroad) impose whatever chemical release risks they choose on unwitting target city citizens, make all the key analyses and decisions ( in the rail security case, on routing), in utter secrecy ("don't alarm the public"), with no meaningful role for state and local officials [as the National Conference of State Legislatures has recently commented] in reducing risks, with no federal standard of adequacy so a railroad's routing decision leaving millions at unnecessary risk can be rationally challenged as inadequate, and with no meaningful federal oversight program (e.g., similar to the US Coast Guard's analysis and approval of 15,000 port security documents --  as Congress mandated).   Feel safe?

Think you can get hold of those L.A. documents and see how defensible those risk choices are, or do you think you will be kindly but firmly rebuffed by the water plant folks, with the rationale that they are all "Sensitive Security Information"?   Should we all just trust and believe that we are all being kept as safe as possible -- until, of course, some 9/11-followup attacks hit some major water facility's chlorine tank cars ?   (Before 9/11 Blue Plains had 10 such fat weapons lined up and sitting out in broad daylight, placarded for all to see.)  If there is an EASIER way to cause a mass-casualty spectacular than to release one or more poison gas (TIH) railcars -- placarded and accessible, as graffiti shows -- which we have pre-positioned for terrrorists' use in all our major target cities, I don't know of one, do you?

And if anyone says, "SSHHH, don't tell the terrorists what are the most horrible weapons readily available," show them the US DOT Emergency Response Guidebook (The Orange Book) available on the Internet and in 21 million fire trucks from Alaska to Argentina, where in the Green Pages at the end DOT has segregated out the most dangerous cargoes and indicated how far downwind they will go.  That horse has left the barn long ago.

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