Tracking Down the CFATS Facilities Near You

Although there is no publicly available list of the roughly 3,200 facilities subject to the tightest restrictions of chemical facility anti-terrorism standards, there are a lot of information sources that reporters can use to find them. Above, an aerial photo of the Formosa Plastics Plant in Louisiana in 2021. Photo: Formulaone via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED).

TipSheet: Tracking Down the CFATS Facilities Near You

By Joseph A. Davis

Chemical terrorism? The U.S. Congress seems to think it’s not a problem. Or at least, in this era of political dysfunction, it has shut down the main program to prevent it.

That program was called CFATS, for Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards. And last July, Congress let it expire. (See this related SEJournal Feature on CFATS from chemical industry reporting veteran Jeff Johnson.)

 

Almost nobody can get information

about what could spark a mass-casualty

chemical disaster in their community.

 

That means almost nobody can get information about what could spark a mass-casualty chemical disaster in their community (or what is being done to prevent it).

TipSheet supposes that is what we have environmental journalists for.

 

Why it matters

Chemical facilities — and the chemicals they handle — can injure, poison or kill people in many ways.

The 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, killed thousands and maimed more. The substances handled at such plants can be toxic, flammable, explosive, corrosive, radioactive or unstable. The toxic effects can be acute or long term.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many in government, industry and the environmental movement became concerned about what could happen if terrorists sabotaged a major chemical plant to cause mass casualties.

 

The backstory

The saga of government’s efforts to collect information about chemical safety — and industry’s efforts to keep it from public view — is epic and too long to outline here.

SEJournal has covered it in this WatchDog Opinion column about widening public information about chemical hazards and these Issue Backgrounders on a potentially explosive fertilizer in your community and on breaking the ‘cycle’ on the chemical safety story.

But a couple of key points are worth noticing up front.

 

Even before 9/11, there were political

struggles over whether the public

should know about chemical risks.

 

First, even before 9/11, there were political struggles over whether the public should know about chemical risks, and whether government should regulate industry practices to improve safety.

Historically, industry has resisted disclosure, as well as the regulation of chemical safety and security by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s why Congress in 2007 put the CFATS program under the Department of Homeland Security. EPA regulates; DHS not so much.

Second, today some in industry actually want the CFATS program back.

Perhaps that’s because, if we are to believe the FBI, domestic terrorism is more of a threat than the Middle East groups we worried about post-9/11. And lone wolf actors — like an employee with passwords and a grudge — are likelier attackers than ISIS.

 

Story ideas and reporting resources

The focus of this tip is to help you find CFATS facilities in your area of interest. But as of now, there is no publicly available list of the roughly 3,200 facilities subject to the tightest restrictions of CFATS.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of information sources that reporters can use to find them. There are many ways to locate and identify chemical facilities. The challenge, of course, is to figure out which of them are (or were, or would be) subject to CFATS.

• Call up Google Maps on your browser. Search for “chemical plants near me” using the search field. Now you can zoom in or out to cover the geographic area you are most interested in. Not all of the results will be CFATS facilities.
• Find RMP, or Risk Management Plan, facilities in your area. This is not easy, because Congress put limits on data access. A nonprofit project called RTKNet collected the data, and the Houston Chronicle published it, but it is no longer online. Fortunately, an outfit called the Data Liberation Project snagged most of it via Freedom of Information Act requests. Look here. This is not the exact same set of facilities as CFATS has, but there is overlap. The data is much more recent than that in RTKNet.
• Use the Toxics Release Inventory, which has open, accessible data about a much larger set of chemical facilities. The set of TRI facilities probably includes most of the CFATS facilities. Besides raw data, TRI has a map presentation that may help you zoom in on the geographic area you are interested in. It also has a sophisticated search engine that will help you zero in on particular chemicals and companies.
• Get your hands on the list of chemicals that are (were) included in CFATS. This may help you narrow down what you are finding in the TRI or elsewhere.
• Use available tools, like EPA’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators model, to discover nearby local populations (from disadvantaged communities to nursery schools) that may be more vulnerable to a chemical disaster.
• And, finally, remember that not all the threats are mammoth petrochemical plants. Examples might include the chlorine at a water plant, a propane transfer station, the fertilizer at a seed and feed store or the ammonia in a refrigeration plant.

[Editor’s Note: For more on this topic, see a TipSheet on using toxic chemicals data for reporting in your community,Toolboxes to help you use the CompTox chemicals dashboard, CAMEO software for covering chemical disasters and TSCA chemical data sets, and a Feature on how journalistic teamwork uncovered years of chemical regulatory failure in Texas. Plus, track related headlines with EJToday.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 8. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.