Technical language: A risk management plan is a facility's best estimate of its potential airborne hazardous threats to surrounding communities. Interpretation: If a facility houses a chemical in a tank, what is the potential damage to human life if that tank releases its contents to the atmosphere? So the risk management plan tells the EPA, which plans to release some of the information on the Web.
Not every facility had to submit a plan, only those that use or make any of 140+ substances defined by the risk management plan program. The kinds of facilities that had to report were chemical companies and a host of facilities that use chemicals, public facilities that use chemicals (such as water treatment plants) and power utilities, the military and government research facilities
What the facilities had to do was figure out what their worst case scenario might be for each listed substance. In effect a facility could have one or a dozen risk management plans to cope with different substances and situations in which all standard safeguards failed.
If you get your hands on such a plan, you could read about the substance, whether it is a liquid or gas, how much would have to be released to cause the worst case scenario-airborne gas, explosion, fire, liquid spill or vaporization, topography (landscape) of the community, distance the release would travel while in a dangerous state, and the number of people who would be killed, including their ethnic group, education level, economic level and other information obtained from the government census.
Understandably, some facilities are worried about what the public is going to say when they find out they may live in the zone that would be affected in a worst case scenario. Will people only hear that they live in the zone and interpret this to mean they are in imminent danger? Or will they perceive that although the zone is a worst case scenario, the facility already has numerous government-approved safeguards and that the worst case scenario is highly unlikely? Will the public even listen to the facility's explanations of the safeguards?
By now, some of these risk management plans are on the Web. What doesn't get on the site is supposed to be made available on paper, to a point. You can't get everything because the EPA isn't going to make everything available. This is because the FBI and other enforcement agencies know that if the data were put on the Internet it would provide the kind of information that might give terrorists an advantage.
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