Concerns rise over chemicals as targets

from Boston.com

WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security watchdogs call them "prepositioned weapons of mass destruction" for terrorists: huge tanks of concentrated deadly gases that the chemical industry stores near densely populated areas and that railroads bring through cities en route to somewhere else. The United States harbors more than 100 chemical facilities where an accident would put more than a million people at risk, according to documents filed with the Environmental Protection Agency. One is in Boston: A chemical distributor acknowledged in its filing that in a worst-case scenario if a tank holding 180,000 pounds of vinyl acetate -- a highly flammable liquid -- ruptured, it would send a 4.9-mile-long toxic cloud through the city. As federal security officials warn that Al Qaeda is poised to strike the United States again, the presence of these highly toxic chemicals in the midst of cities may be the most vulnerable point in the nation's defenses. But proposals to reduce that risk by requiring the use of alternative chemicals or rerouting hazardous tankers around a city have faltered. Fear of such an attack on a chemical facility prompted bipartisan momentum in Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks for requiring the chemical industry to switch to less dangerous processes where possible. Although many Republicans supported the measure initially, many changed their minds after intense industry lobbying, and the bill died on the Senate floor. Nearly three years later, the laws regulating chemical plants remain the same as before Sept. 11 -- a striking exception to an otherwise transformed security landscape. Similarly, support has emerged for new regulations on railroads that carry dangerous materials such as chlorine through urban areas. Rupturing a chlorine rail tanker would produce a 40-mile-long cloud of the same deadly gas used as a weapon in World War I. But a first-in-the-nation proposal by the District of Columbia City Council to reroute tankers carrying such hazardous cargo around the nation's capital has been stalled for months: The chemical and rail industries objected, with backing from the Bush administration.

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