Schneier on Security

Bob • March 19, 2009 12:26 AM

The original article Bruce linked to, in the house organ of the American Chemical Society, is worth a read.

People at the Bayer plant called 911 repeatedly and then wouldn’t talk about what was going on, even when asking for an ambulance. The frustrated county authorities eventually “called for shelter-in-place for several thousand people living near the plant.” In other words, thousands of people were effectively imprisoned in their houses because Bayer was stonewalling.

I was a chemist in a former life, and for a year was the process control engineer for a chemical factory in Texas, where I dealt with government regulations, so I know some of what Bayer was dealing with.

Having been there, I have no sympathy for the people who made the decisions to stonewall during an emergency. If you’re moral, sometimes you just have to do what’s right and to heck with regulations and laws and company policy.

In this case, we had two people killed at a plant that stores more methyl isocyanate than Bhopal did (in fact, it’s Bhopal’s sister plant), and which has had previous explosions. And the excuse for stonewalling is because the plant is on the Kanawha river, and – what? Al Qaeda is going to come zipping along in their Zodiacs?

I wish we lived in a world where people actually dying trumped movie-plot scenarios.

Bob • March 19, 2009 3:25 PM

I also deal with a lot of sensitive information and subscribe to “when in doubt, don’t” about discussing it.

But in the case of Bayer’s CropScience plant, concealing details of the plant’s construction or the accident is trying to close the barn door after the horses are already out. The escaped horses are the well-known facts that the plant stores huge quantities of highly toxic gases, and is about three miles upwind of downtown Charleston.

Anything else is small beer to an attacker who’s willing and able to hijack an airliner and crash it into something.

But there’s a better solution than security-through-putative-obscurity: make sure a catastrophe simply can’t happen, no matter what some terrorist or nutcase does.

As the original article mentions, many chemical plants have moved to a system known as “inherently safer process design”. That’s where you either don’t use hazardous chemicals in the first place, or make them in small quantities as needed from non-hazardous reagents, and use them immediately instead of storing them. As the article remarks about methyl isocyanate, a company like Bayer “can literally produce MIC and use it up on the spot… [the] technology has been around since the 1960s.”

Like the CropScience plant, a DuPont plant cited in the article also uses methyl isocyanate to make pesticides. But unlike CropScience, DuPont makes it from a non-hazardous chemical and “the only MIC on-site is in a short transfer line.” So terrorists could blow that plant up, but instead of causing thousands of casualties and chaos and riots, they’d just generate a big insurance claim.

Perhaps a tax break is in order for companies that refit old, dangerous facilities using “inherently safer process design”.