ISCD Director Speaks on Preliminary Inspections

The acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) Dennis Deziel offered insight into DHS’s direction on preliminary inspections while speaking at the National Association of Chemical Distributors (NACD) Operations Seminar and Trade Show in Austin, Texas this week.

Deziel stated that officials plan to increase preliminary inspections of chemical facilities regulated by the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) to 30-40 facilities per month beginning in August. He stated that many of the Site Security Plans (SSPs) submitted thus far need more detail, and indicated that the Chemical Security Assessment Tool used to submit SSPs “is not perfect,” noting that “there hasn’t been a lot of guidance given to facilities.”

Speaking directly on the preliminary inspections Deziel offered the following:

“It’s almost like a real inspection. We’re there for up to a week. We walk through their draft site-security plan, get a sense of what is at the site, what they said in their plan, and making sure they add the detail they need to ... We’ve found [the preliminary inspections] are a pretty critical piece. People are now starting to understand exactly what the expectations are, which helps us get quality site-security plans.”