EmergencyTech.org

Here’s a good one from Brice Schneier over at the (quite excellent) Schneier on Security blog:

In the small Massachusetts town of Cheshire (pop. 3,500) there is reason for celebration, and dismay. You see, the Cheshire Fire Department has two problems: they need a new fire truck and they need to find a way to spend the homeland security grant that they recently recieved. A grant to the tune of $665,962, a mere 26 (yes, twenty-six) times their annual operating budget.

Don’t see the problem yet? Read on:

And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck.

Instead, the town won a grant to fortify the ranks of its volunteer brigade. Its selectmen plan to huddle later this month to hash out a spending plan.

Asked how the money will be spent, Cheshire Fire Chief George Sweet cryptically replied yesterday: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Sweet said he couldn’t say much more about the windfall. Indeed, Cheshire’s officialdom is a nervous wreck over it and is reviewing federal grant guidelines.

“We’ve never had this much money dropped in our laps,” said Cheshire town administrator Mark Webber. “People get fined and go to jail because they don’t handle money like this properly.”

Although the town is home to the Cheshire Cheese Monument (a quite impressive pile of cheese, at that), there is little else to justify this small town department receiving the largest grant award of any town or agency in the state of Massachusetts.

What this amounts to is nothing more than pork-barrel politics, say some Washington security insiders:

Security specialist James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, was blunt: “It’s pure pork. It has nothing to do with homeland security.”

The money comes from the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grants, a program that was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security after the agency was established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Asked about Cheshire’s grant, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Val Bunting said yesterday that the town “presented a multifaceted project proposal.” She said the grant could be spent over four years, but she would not elaborate .

Carafano said the emergency response program was designed to funnel money to small fire departments and has wide support in Washington “because everyone has a fire department in their district.”

But now, Carafano said, “the money is spent under the big lie that it’s about national security.”

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File this one under “you must be kidding me”:

For years services have re-used single use devices like cervical collars, head-immobilizers, and tourniquets in an effort to reduce waste keep costs down. The theory was, “a few squirts or disinfectant and they’re good as new.” Historically durable stainless steel surgical devices like forceps and spreaders have been steam autoclaved or otherwise sterilized before reuse. It is prohibitively expensive for facilities to just throw away durable equipment after a single use but they are designed to be used over and over unlike fragile tracheal and endotracheal tubes which are made of plastic or other soft materials.

This is the first that I have heard of sterilizing and reusing single-use invasive medical devices like endotracheal tubes.

Reprocessed devices are soaked in sterilizing solutions, disassembled, blasted clean with a fine powder, reassembled and inspected, then packaged, sterilized and resealed. On average, they’re reused three to six times.

Today, the AP reports on federal legislation that will address the increasing use of “reprocessed medical devices” and the medical and ethical complications that arise such as those suffered by Sean Van Duyn after an Orlando hospital placed a reprocessed single-use only tube in his tracheal stoma. There is also the issue of informed consent as Van Duyn’s parents, for example, were never told that the devices labelled “single use only” were in fact used on other patients, up to six other patients.

Federal regulators say reprocessing is safe, but original device manufacturers say they can’t guarantee recycled products will work correctly — and that they are wrongly blamed for malfunctions and patient harm caused by reprocessing.

A federal law taking effect Tuesday, requiring reprocessors to put their company name on recycled devices as well as the packaging, could help determine who’s at fault when problems occur. For devices too small to mark, detachable stickers could be transferred to the patient’s chart.

“That’s like a ‘Sue Me!’ sticker,” and may not be used much, said Josephine Torrente, a lawyer and biomedical engineer who consults for device manufacturers.

The practice, that reportedly saves hospitals 50% over purchasing new equipment, has become so prevalent that there is even a professiona organization that represents the reprocessing companies, the Association of Medical Device Reprocessors. Their position is that the, “products are totally safe because each item is inspected before being shipped.”
The argument has, however, extended past the bounds of ethical medical practice and solid patient advocacy and has become one of copyright.

Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon Endo-Surgery is suing the biggest reprocessor, Ascent Healthcare Solutions, for trademark infringement over reprocessing its single-use devices.

“It is impossible to reuse them,” said Robert O’Holla, J&J’s head of regulatory affairs for medical devices, because they are not designed to be taken apart for cleaning. Yet J&J gets complaints from customers about problems with devices showing excessive wear or bleach on them — signs of reprocessing.

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I’ve been a big proponent of doing what they did in the UK a long time ago - getting away from the top-heavy, maintenance intensive 4 wheel drive gasoline flycar and moving to more durable diesel sedans that get excellent fuel mileage and are (and here’s the part that gets me heat every time) safer and just as useful.

I think the difficulty in convincing people that this is the right way to go is in overcoming the testosterone-factor that comes with the big 4WD sport utility vehicles that are commonly used for flycars in the states. There, I’ve said it and I mean it. Sure, the SUV has its place in climates where 4 wheel drive is useful (although my AWD sedan does just fine, as would an AWD vehicle - more on this weak justification after the jump) like in the montains and the snow-belt. Moving to something like this little diesel number from Volkswagen called the Polo has numerous advantages:

• Fuel efficiency - let me see you squeeze 72 mpg out of a Chevy Tahoe or Suburban. Not only reducing cost, the increased mpg means fewer out of service trips to the pump and a higher unit hour utilization.
• Maintainance - it’s a diesel, need I say more?
• Size - if well layed out this vehicle can carry just as much useful gear as is needed in your average advanced life support flycar or supervisor vehicle. Also, its smaller size makes it able to fit in congested urban areas and busy-hospital parking spots that a Hemi-Durango couldn’t dream of.
• Safety - its diminutive size may curb the agressive driving that causes quite a few accidents. Operators may be more conscious of their driving if they’re not in some lumbering beast.
• Cost - The VW Polo retails for $19,990. Even using the State Bid process that beats the pants off of most SUV’s.

Sure, the Polo’s not the fastest thing on the road topping out at a blistering 62 mph; however, before I hear it — everyone go get their agency’s driving policy and show me that it’s okay to go faster than 62 in an urban setting where most posted speed limits are in the 25-35 mph range. Everyone got it? Okay.

More after the jump. Continue Reading »

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After much debate, many amendments, and a 100-0 vote the Senate approved H.R. 5441: the DHS appropriations bill

- S.Amdt.4574, by Sen. Coleman, would move DHS forward to implement one of the key provisions of the now-stalled Greenlane Maritime Cargo Security Act: the testing of 100% screening at three major foreign ports. The amendment passed by unanimous consent.

- S.Amdt.4594 (Voinovich) and S.Amdt.4626 (Dodd), which increase funding for the Emergency Management Performance Grant and Firefighter Assistance Grant programs respectively. The increases in funds for these programs are made by increasing a rescission to DHS’s FY ‘06 science & technology budget and cutting the DHS management budget respectively - both questionable judgments, in my opinion. These two amendments both passed by unanimous consent.

- S.Amdt.4620, by Sen. Byrd, which would give DHS the authority to regulate chemical plant security, as a stopgap measure prior to the passage of a comprehensive chemical security bill. The amendment passed by unanimous consent.

- S.Amdt.4634, by Sen. Menendez, which would have reduced the “mandatory state minimums” in Patriot Act-sanctioned homeland security grant programs from 0.75% to 0.25%. The amendment failed by a 36-64 vote, with large state Senators voting in favor of it and nearly all small state Senators voting against it. A few small state Senators voted for the amendment, against their states’ pecuniary interests, to their immense credit: Byrd, Coburn, Gregg, Inhofe, Inouye, and McCain.

One of the hardest hit programs was the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office:

Take the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, responsible for developing a national architecture to detect and prevent the use of nuclear or radiological weapons on U.S. soil. By all accounts the DNDO has been doing a solid job in its first 17 months of existence. The DHS budget request proposed $536 million for the DNDO in FY 2007. The House bill cuts this funding level to $500 million, and the Senate bill scales it to $442.5 million - all out of the DNDO’s R&D budget.

Via HLSW

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By now everyone has heard of the ridiculous list of items that made it into the Department of Homeland Security’s report on “critical infrastructure sites.” You know, the one about the Amish popcorn factory that is a crucial piece of the way we run our society or the Brooklyn Bridge which is just another bridge. Stop me if you’ve heard this one already.

The Seattle Times has a nice piece that pokes fun at the clearly Pork nature of these classifications and the misallocation of funds that they lead too. Here are some examples they cite:

An ice-cream parlor. A tackle shop. A flea market. An Amish popcorn factory.
Seven hundred mortuaries made the list. Terrorists know no limits if they’re planning attacks on our dead people.
The report says our state has a whopping 3,650 critical sites, sixth in the U.S. It didn’t identify them — remember, we wouldn’t want this list of eateries, zoos and golf courses to fall into the wrong hands.

That number, 3,650, is so high I’m positive we haven’t heard the most farcical of it yet.

Pork programs, or “pork barrel” programs is a derogatory term describing government spending that is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form of campaign contributions or votes (via wikipedia). Listing more sites gets more funding for the areas in which those sites are located.

This is one of the reasons that we’ve seen strange allocations of homeland security funds. Should DHS funding be used to buy surveillance cameras in Dillingham, Alaska (pop. 2,400) or protecting critical areas of our country? I think the answer should be pretty obvious.

Know any other “key sites” that need to be protected? Post them in comments (and ideas on how to protect them) and I’ll make sure that they get sent off to the deep pockets in DC.

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