Crimes Against Nature (21 page)

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Whitman was attempting to respond to the public outcry over lax security at chemical plants. The Clean Air Act empowers the EPA to force companies to safeguard the public from accidental chemical releases. But the agency had never issued regulations requiring precautions against a terrorist attack. After September 11, while Corzine was trying to push his bill through the Senate, the EPA staff developed a plan to use the agency’s authority to require improvements in chemical plant security. The suggested reforms echoed Corzine’s; facilities ought to reduce toxic inventories and use less dangerous chemicals where feasible. If plants can convert to safer chemicals or processes that cannot be used as weapons of mass destruction, it obviously lessens the daunting task of guarding those facilities. The late Jim Makris, then-chief of the EPA’s Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office, said the goal would be to make it habitual among company management to think about ways to make their plants safer.
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The chemical lobby also opposed the notion of requiring plants to use safer technologies. Greg Lebedev, then-president of the ACC, took a stab at explaining industry fears about regulations in an interview with New Jersey’s
Bergen Record.
“Chemical companies make dangerous things. Getting into the technology of what you make and how you make it is a subject for an environmental or technology context, not security. I don’t want to wander down an exotic path here.”
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Whitman was caught in the squeeze between the public clamor for action and her reluctance to confront the chemical industry and powerful White House friends. So instead of using its existing authority, the EPA worked with the White House for a year trying to hammer out a regulatory proposal that wouldn’t anger industry. That effort finally died due to White House intransigence.

Still, Whitman was under pressure to do
something
— there was too much noise in the press about the threat from chemical plants. So she decided to beef up inspections. The EPA has the authority to inspect chemical plants at will, without permission or advance notice. But Whitman wasn’t prepared to antagonize the White House. So with the confidence that marked her tenure at the EPA, she boldly asked permission of the nation’s 30 highest-risk chemical plants to allow inspectors to visit their facilities.
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Some companies refused outright, and the chemical moguls called in their White House chits to end the EPA’s meddling once and for all. In early 2003, under industry pressure, the White House yanked the EPA’s authority over chemical security and transferred oversight to the Department of Homeland Security.
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From the industry’s perspective, the DHS was the perfect overseer. A fledgling department with no expertise to inspect chemical plants or legal authority to require the chemical industry to implement tougher security standards, the DHS was unlikely to impose new burdens. Since then, the federal government has not troubled the industry about security.

“There are currently no federal security standards for chemical facilities,” Corzine told me. “None at all. The industry does what it desires or what it thinks it can afford — and millions of Americans are at risk.”
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The argument advanced by the chemical companies after September 11 — and the one that the Bush administration apparently swallowed — is that, left alone, producers will take voluntary measures sufficient to protect the public. The ACC claimed that its own chemical security code, which is mandatory for its members, would lead to tighter chemical security than would Corzine’s bill. Yet only 7 percent of the 15,000 chemical facilities in the United States are members of the ACC.
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Moreover, the voluntary plans that do exist are anything but stringent. Sal DePasquale, a former Georgia Pacific official who helped write the ACC’s security plan, wrote in a letter to the U.S. PIRG that voluntary standards are “a smoke and mirrors exercise to make it appear that it is issuing bona fide standards…. Across the country there are huge storage tanks with highly dangerous materials that are far from adequately secured.”
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Even Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has stated that “voluntary efforts alone are not sufficient.”
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You can say that again. In April 2002, a
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
reporter named Carl Prine wrote of how he was able to enter 60 dangerous chemical plants virtually unchallenged.
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In Baltimore, Houston, and Chicago, he strolled through unguarded gates in broad daylight, wearing a press pass and carrying a camera. He drove up to tanks, pipes, and control rooms considered key terrorist targets. Hardly anyone tried to stop him. He found security nonexistent in many places. “I walked into one Chicago plant,” he told me. “I climbed on top of the tank and sat there and waved, ‘Hello! I’m on your tank.’ I wondered what it would take for me to get arrested at one of these plants. Would I have to come in carrying an AK-47? What would it take for someone to say ‘Why is this guy walking around taking pictures of our tanks?’ ” Reporters from all over the country took Prine’s lead and filed stories about their infiltration of dangerous plants.
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Secretary Ridge acknowledged these reports when he testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on July 10, 2003, noting that there were deficiencies at “dozens and dozens” of U.S. chemical facilities. “Our enemies,” he warned, “look at [chemical plants] as targets.”
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To the right-wing radicals in the White House, laissez-faire capitalism is the legitimate response to every contingency — even national security. On March 21, 2003, PBS reporter Daniel Zwerdling questioned Tom Ridge’s top aide, Al Martinez-Fonts, about Homeland Security’s reluctance to mandate security reforms in the chemical industry beyond voluntary programs.
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Martinez-Fonts, a former executive of JP Morgan Chase, said that, even in a time of war, the Bush administration was reluctant to interfere with business decisions by the private sector.

“I was in the private sector all my life,” explained Martinez-Fonts. “Did I like it when the government came in and stepped in and told [us] to do certain things? The answer’s no. In general, we don’t like to be told what to do…. The administration has been very proactive towards business, promoting business issues, et cetera. The point is, people are concerned that a lot of regulation, a lot of legislation might ultimately come out. I think we’re trying to avoid that. I, as the person representing the private sector in Homeland Security, would prefer to avoid that altogether.”

When Zwerdling reminded Martinez-Fonts that the federal government told the airline industry to improve its security and asked whether it doesn’t make sense for the government to also require security upgrades by the chemical industry, Martinez-Fonts replied: “Well, the answer is because September 11 happened, and they were airplanes that rammed into buildings. And it was not chemical plants that were blown up.”

So much for homeland security!

Of course, toxic chemical plants aren’t the only potential dirty bombs on American soil. The nation’s nuclear power plants pose an equally devastating threat. The most vulnerable one happens to be in my backyard. I live in Mount Kisco, New York, 11 miles downwind of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Indian Point’s two remaining active reactors — Unit 1 was shut down in 1974 — sit on the east bank of the Hudson River, 24 miles north of New York City.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston passed within a few thousand feet of Indian Point as it followed the Hudson River down to its rendezvous with Tower Two of the World Trade Center. Had it banked left and crashed into the plant instead, it could have triggered a large release of radiation. The surrounding area, including New York City, might have been rendered uninhabitable for years.

Neither the NRDC nor the Hudson Riverkeeper have ever taken a stand against nuclear power, but following the terror attacks, the communities surrounding Indian Point inundated our offices with phone calls and letters expressing concern about plant safety. The plant, however, carried on, business as usual.

Meanwhile, a few miles from my home, busy roads were closed to prevent anyone from getting near upstate reservoirs. Sport fishermen — a major economic resource to the region — were ordered off the reservoirs, and subsequently the bait-and-tackle shops shut down. The proprietor of Bob’s Tackle Shop in Katonah was stoic about closing her family business, but wondered why Indian Point was still chugging along. “It’s crazy,” says Captain Ron Gatto, the top cop in the city’s upstate reservoir. “There is no way a fisherman could sabotage the city’s water supply — you’d need tanker trucks filled with poison. Everyone knows that the biggest threat is Indian Point. I lose sleep knowing how vulnerable this whole system is. It’s absolutely insane — they’re only open ’cause they’ve got pals in Washington.”
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This outcry prompted us to study Indian Point in light of the risks of terrorist attack. No nuclear facility in the United States is closer to such a densely populated metropolitan area.
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Captain Gatto is not the first person to use the word “insane” to describe Indian Point. Commenting on the siting of Indian Point in 1979, in the wake of the Three Mile Island meltdown, Robert Ryan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s director of the Office of State Programs, stated: “I think it is insane to have a three-unit reactor on the Hudson River in Westchester County, forty miles from Times Square, twenty miles from the Bronx. And if you describe that fifty-mile circle, you’ve got twenty-one million people. And that’s crazy. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that that’s the right place to put a nuclear facility.”
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Contrary to the public perception aggressively promoted by the industry, terrorists would not have to puncture the containment dome to cause a serious accident or meltdown. Nuclear plants like Indian Point are vulnerable at half a dozen points, some of them virtually impossible to shield from determined attackers. Terrorists could provoke a meltdown by coordinating attacks against the reactor’s cooling system or the plant’s control room, by cutting electric lines going into or out of the plant, or, more alarmingly, by disabling the cooling-water pumps and intake structures, which are easily approached from the river’s channel.

Worst of all, in a catastrophe that would rival or exceed the impact of a meltdown, terrorists could attack the plant’s spent fuel pools, which house 30 years of accumulated high-level radioactive waste and are shielded only by a series of flimsy annex buildings, so-called butler shacks that have the structural integrity of a Kmart. Indian Point’s irradiated spent-fuel pools contain more than 1,500 tons of high-level radioactive waste.
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According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a significant loss of water within the spent-fuel pools could provoke a fuel-assembly fire that could potentially release a pool’s store of cesium 137 — up to 20 times the amount released at Chernobyl, which made an area approximately 1,000 miles around the plant uninhabitable, 100 miles of it permanently.
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Imagine a world without New York City. The terrorists have. The Al Qaeda network and other groups have cited nuclear power plants as potential U.S. targets. President Bush warned us during his 2002 State of the Union Address that Al Qaeda terrorists possess diagrams of U.S. nuclear facilities. On the CBS news program
60 Minutes II,
Yosri Fouda, a reporter for the Arabic news network Al Jazeera, said that when he interviewed the recently captured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of the September 11 attacks, in the spring of 2002, Mohammed said that nuclear facilities in the United States were Al Qaeda’s first choice of a target.
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In November 2002, the FBI warned that Al Qaeda sleeper cells could be planning attacks on U.S. nuclear power plants near our largest cities to try to inflict “severe economic damage and maximum psychological trauma.”
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Indian Point’s proximity to the world’s financial center, and the severe consequences for public health, national security, the environment, and the economy in the event of a successful terrorist attack make that plant especially attractive.

With this in mind, you would think, and most people do, that in a country as civilized and technologically advanced as ours, nuclear plants would be among our most secure facilities. Amazingly, the opposite is true. Indian Point and other plants near Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., are virtually unprotected against terrorist attack on the scale of September 11.
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If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this astounding fact: Federal law absolves nuclear power plant operators from any legal duty to protect their plants from attacks “by enemies of the United States.”
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So who does shoulder this heavy burden? Governor George Pataki of New York tells us that it is the federal government. But try to find a federal agency that will take responsibility. Not the NRC, not the Department of Homeland Security, and not the Pentagon.