Some public health experts and government leaders are calling for new efforts to protect people from the risk of a terrorist attack on plants that manufacture or store chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:
Transcript
Some public health experts and government leaders are calling for new efforts to protect people from the risk of a terrorist attack on plants that manufacture or store chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Six months after terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., little has been done across most of the nation to reduce the risk of attacks on chemical plants. A new publication called the “Safe Hometowns Guide” outlines ways to better protect neighborhoods. Alan Finkelstein is a firefighter in Cuyahoga County, Ohio where some chemical companies have reduced the number of train cars of chemicals they store, and put the remaining cars in containment buildings.
“It’s not environmental groups versus government versus chemical companies. We can all do something to improve the situation here. We can encourage the companies to decrease or eliminate the chemical hazards in their inventories. The Safe Hometowns guide will give us the ability to go out to the communities and give us a framework for setting up some kind of plan.”
Finkelstein and a number of other experts called on government and industry to work together to reduce chemical quantities and find safer chemical substitutes where possible.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.