New Jersey Accidentally Passes Environmental Measure

If there's one place in the nation that a chemical-spewing, filth-belching factory can feel right at home, it's New Jersey. But yesterday Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey passed a series of security measures for its chemical plants that require them to assess potential risks from terrorist attacks. In some high-risk cases the threat could affect over 1 million people. And here's the kicker: the rules require roughly one third of the highest risk candidates to review the potential for using chemicals in their plants that are safer. Whoooooops!

Spurned and disillusioned, the factories responded by lamenting the end of their sado-masochistic love fest with the state of New Jersey.

• Industry officials criticized the new standards, saying chemical companies have cooperated with the state and have already spent more than $100 million on improving security. Hal Bozarth, executive director of the 72-member Chemistry Council of New Jersey, said the new set of requirements "sort of ends a feeling of 'Let's work together,' and it implies that we've done nothing, which is far from true."

Their own security measures have included a $1 million giant picture of Osama Bin Laden to hang over a landfill and hurl barrels of toxic waste at, and electric collars to keep the C.H.U.D. born out of the primordial toxic ooze from leaving the perimiter.

The industry responded to these measures with a series of television ads that depict someone recycling a plastic bottle and then pan over to the side of the road where a chemical factory watches with a single tear in its eye.