Preparedness

[Tim May]

On Friday, September 21, 2001, at 08:44 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> * The Washington City Paper has a horrific cover story this week on the 
> city's beyond-pathetic response to Tuesday's attacks:
> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/cover/cover.html
>> Even before the fire at the crippled Pentagon across the Potomac had 
>> been extinguished, frightening shortcomings in the District's 
>> emergency preparedness were laid bare. Communications broke down, and 
>> key District leaders scrambled to exchange information via e-mail and 
>> pagers. The fire department had scant reserve equipment, a single 
>> hazardous-materials unit, and no search-and-rescue units available to 
>> dispatch. There was no master terrorism-response plan in place, so 
>> agency heads reached for whatever was available on the nearest 
>> shelfwhich for some meant Y2K plans and, for the fire department, a 
>> 1968 deployment guideline drafted in response to the riots following 
>> the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

This confusion and chaos was pretty much anticipated by Y2K worriers: 
had anything disrupted transport or communications, D.C. looked to be in 
bad shape. (I recall comparisons made to Montgomery County, which had 
some problems with emergency systems, but seemed much better prepared.

It's also surprising that an attack on the Pentagon, across the river, 
triggered chaos inside D.C. per se.

A friend of mine thinks NYC may actually be a target a second time 
around: moving vans or other large trucks loaded with explosives and 
detonated inside the Holland and other tunnel(s).

(I think there was a Sylvester Stallone movie which I never saw about a 
similar plan..."Daylight" was the name, I think. Interestingly, 
Hollywood usually has the hero stopping the timer at the 4-second mark, 
near the movie's end. Like diverting the asteroids and comets. Like 
stopping the Andromeda Strain from escaping. When a nuke _does_ go off, 
as in "True Lies," it's several miles away and only produces some 
suntans. Reality is not so antiseptic.)


--Tim May