This morning the Federal Environmental Process Protection Agency (FEPPA) announced that it was implementing Defense Production Act supervisory authority for all bulk chlorine shipments in the United States. The Agency was taking this action because of the loss of production at the NACL Industries facility in Louisiana.
“The nation is experiencing a critical shortage of chlorine gas for water treatment and wastewater treatment facilities because of the terrorist attack on the chlorine production facility in Louisiana,” Jay Muir, FEPPA spokesperson told reporters this morning, “The NACL Industries facility was almost 20% of our national production capability and that places a severe strain on facilities that need that material for public sanitation needs.”
A press release from the Chlorine Gas Institute explained that there is still sufficient chlorine product to meet sanitation needs even with the closure of the NACL Industries facility. “Our manufacturers have legal obligations to other customers that must be taken into account,” spokesman Hamilton Castner explained, “We welcome the efforts of FEPPA to help prioritize the allocation of our temporarily restricted resources, but the government must realize that chlorine gas is used in a large number of critical manufacturing processes including many pharmaceuticals. We cannot just cut off supply to those industries.”
“FEPPA is working hard to coordinate with all critical users of chlorine gas,” Muir said, responding to questions about chlorine allocations, “But we have been notified by four drinking water utilities in the southeast that they are going to have to initiate boil water warnings for their systems later this week because of the loss of shipments of chlorine gas.” FEPPA is reporting that those four water systems supply drinking water to 2.5 million households.
In an update on the ongoing terrorist threat to chlorine manufacturing, the National Critical Infrastructure Security Operations Center reported today that they had found initial stages of compromise at two additional chlorine manufacturing agencies. This required a temporary shut down of the manufacturing control systems at those facilities to deal with the early stages of the attack. “Production at those facilities should resume later this week,” General Turgidson, Director of CI-SOC, told reporters this morning.
Dade Murphy, CTO of Dragonfire Cyber, the company working directly on the response at NACL Industries, told reporters at the morning CI-SOC press conference that his company had ten responders at the facility working with representatives from Robotron, the supplier of the control system used at the facility, and elements of the Louisiana National Guard, all working on restoring the control system at the facility.
“We are having to carefully check each programmable piece of equipment on the site,” Dade explained, “We need to insure that there are no elements of the wiper program left on the devices before we can reload the software or firmware to the device. Once that is done, we will be able to use the system backups to restore the actual operating controls and programming for the facility.”
A control system technician that was not authorized to speak to the press told me that remnants of the “SMASHINGCOCONUT” wiper program had been found in a number of pieces of equipment throughout the facility. “Someone wanted to be able to come back and wipe this system out again, if we got it restored,” she told me.
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