Assessment of the Bureau of Reclamation's Security Program (2008) / Chapter Skim
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Serbian forces attempted to blow up the Peruća dam in Croatia in 1993 during the Serbo-Croatian War. Hoover Dam was identified as a potential target for enemy forces during World War II, and the sabotage of Glen Canyon Dam was fictionalized in the 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.
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is responsible for managing and operating some of this nation's largest and most critical dams, including five national critical infrastructure (NCI) facilities: the Hoover, Grand Coulee, Folsom, Shasta, and Glen Canyon dams.
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OVERVIEW OF THIS STUDY At the request of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the National Research Council, through the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, appointed a multidisciplinary committee of 14 experts to assess Reclamation's security program and determine its level of preparedness to deter, respond to, and recover from malicious acts to its physical infrastructure and to the people who use and manage it. The committee members have experience in government, academia, and the private sector and expertise in physical security, law enforcement, threat assessment and mitigation, risk analysis, dam safety, civil engineering, and emergency response (Appendix A)
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CONCLUSIONS The committee's overall conclusion is that although the Bureau of Reclamation is better able today to protect its infrastructure and its people against malicious acts than it was 7 years ago, the security program is not yet mature, well-integrated, or appropriately supported at all levels of the organization. To date, Reclamation has focused on tactical issues: developing a risk management approach; establishing security plans for each facility; staffing a security and law enforcement office; and developing an intelligence gathering and analysis capability.
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However, some recommendations require action sooner than others because they will help to avoid undesirable outcomes and will yield both immediate and long-term benefits. These actions include the development of • An out-of-cycle process for security assessments; • Policy on the use of deadly force; • Response plans for security-related incidents; • A streamlined personal identity verification process; • Preproject planning for security-related projects; and • Procedures related to the sharing of intelligence-based information.
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Security-related intelligence has not been integrated into site-specific, realistic threat scenarios to the committee's knowledge. Recommendation 3: Reclamation and the SSLE should review their facility security plans as a system, identify gaps in the integration of the various elements, develop a range of realistic, site-specific threat scenarios based on local conditions and intelligence from all available sources, and conduct both contingency planning and training exercises using these scenarios.
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Recommendation 4: Reclamation should ensure that all security and law enforcement entities that would respond to a security-related incident at one of its facilities have a clear understanding of the lines of authority, roles, and responsibilities outlined in the response plan. The various security and law enforcement entities at each facility should train together to practice the actions each entity would be responsible for in a realistic scenario (Findings 6, 7, 8)
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. POLICIES AND OPERATIONAL GUIDANCE FOR KEY ASPECTS OF THE PROGRAM Finding 13: The distinction between law enforcement and security within Reclamation is not clear, and the resulting ambiguity has raised issues regarding the use of deadly force during a security-related incident.
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The legislation giving Reclamation law enforcement authority does not address issues of antiterrorism or security, nor does it permit Reclamation to directly hire its own law enforcement personnel. Recommendation 11: Reclamation's senior executives and security managers should identify the gaps in their authority for creating an effective security program and, if necessary, seek authorizing legislation that will allow implementation of a more robust program (Finding 16)
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. Finding 20: Field personnel and others who have reported potentially valuable information about suspicious activities to the SSLE in Denver only rarely receive feedback on how or if the information was used.
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Finding 25: Folsom Dam requires special consideration within the national critical infrastructure classification owing to the magnitude of the potential consequences of a security-related failure. The level of resources required for effective security is greater at Folsom than elsewhere.
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Where after-action reports followed major exercises, they were not disseminated to all the regions or the area offices that could have benefited from knowing the exercise results. Recommendation 20: In the short term, SSLE should distribute afteraction reports to the appropriate staff at all area and regional offices to leverage the knowledge gained from training exercises.
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2006. National Infrastructure Protection Plan.
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