Simulating
Terrorism
Feds Plan Major 10-Day
Terrorism Response Exercises in 3 Cities
A Chemical,Biological,
Incidence Response Force (CBIRF) responds to a mock emergency while participating
in "Kernel Blitz '99", March 13, 1999, at the Defense Language Institute
in Monterey, Calif. (Ben Marg)
By David Ruppe
May
2, 2000— The federal government
has begun preparing three U.S. cities for large-scale, 10-day terrorism-response
exercises scheduled this month.
Beginning sometime
between May 7 and May 29, local, state and top level federal authorities
will respond to simulated weapons of mass destruction attacks in three
cities — Denver, Portsmouth, N.H., and the Washington, D.C.-area.
Denver or Portsmouth will face
either a simulated biological or a chemical weapons attack. The D.C. metropolitan
area will respond to a radiological attack drill — which could range from
simply an exposed container of radioactive material to a small nuclear
detonation.
Looking
for Realism
The congressionally mandated exercises are intended to
examine how well local, state and federal authorities are prepared to respond
to and together deal with the consequences of a weapons of mass destruction
attack.
“The goal of the exercise is
to assess the nation’s crisis consequence management capacity under extraordinarily
stressful conditions,” the Department of Justice said in a statement released
Thursday.
Denver
or Portsmouth will face either a simulated biological or a chemical weapons
attack. The D.C. metropolitan area will respond to a radiological attack
drill — which could range from simply an exposed container of radioactive
material to a small nuclear detonation. (ABCNEWS.com/ Magellan Geographix) |
Specific dates and characteristics of the exercise are
being withheld from participants, to make the tests as realistic as possible.
Volunteers and professional
actors will play the roles of victims, who will be rescued, diagnosed,
decontaminated and treated over the 10-day period. A “virtual news network”
will be created that will broadcast on the exercises every hour on the
hour. But the exercises will not be too realistic, authorities say. No
weapons or agents will be released and, to minimize the risk of public
panic or real-life accidents, emergency responders will not be speeding
with lights and sirens blaring to the scenes of attack.
“We’re doing as much as we can
by way of outreach through the media to ensure that all of the residents
in the jurisdiction or the cities that we’re exercising in know that they’re
occurring, knowing that they’re safe from harm,” said Doug Johnson, the
Justice Department’s spokesman for the exercises.
Congress has provided $3.5 million
for the Denver and Portsmouth exercises, which are called “TOPOFF,” reflecting
the participation of senior officials. The exercise in the D.C. area, involving
district and Prince Georges County, Md., authorities, is called National
Capital Region 2000, or NCR-2000 for short.
All
Levels Involved
The three exercises are expected to involve all key personnel
who would respond to an attack: federal agency personnel and state and
local emergency responders, including police, fire and emergency medical
personnel.
Though terrorism response exercises
are conducted routinely across the country, “this marks the first time
that an exercise of this scope, with the participation of top-level federal,
state and local officials, has ever been conducted,” the Justice Department
said.
Mayors, city managers, state
governors are expected to participate, as are some senior federal officials:
Attorney General Janet Reno, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director
James Lee Witt, and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala.
Justice and the FEMA will be
the lead federal agencies in the exercise.
Numerous other federal agencies
were involved in the planning exercises, including: the U.S. Departments
of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Transportation; the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms; the FBI; the CIA; the National Security Council;
the Environmental Protection Agency; and the General Services Administration.
Not
Yet Prepared
Following two major incidents of domestic terrorism in
the 1990s, the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, Congress
and the Clinton Administration made national preparation for dealing with
terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction a high government priority.
Congress has appropriated about
$10 billion annually in recent years for combating terrorism — up from
around $6.5 billion in 1996 — and various federal agencies have been training
local authorities in scores of cities across the country to deal with a
major attack.
But federal efforts have been
criticized on a number of fronts, particularly: for not devoting enough
money to fully equip local and state authorities across the nation; for
not clearly delineating the authorities of various federal agencies; and
for failing to adequately assess where the money could best be spent.
“One of the major deficiencies
in federal efforts to combat terrorism is the lack of linkage between the
terrorist threat, a national strategy, and agency resources,” Congress’s
investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, said in an April 6 report.
Gauging
the Threat
The GAO has stressed that exercises such as TOPOFF and
NRC-2000 can be useful in developing a national strategy and targeting
resources.
A similar, secret exercise recently
conducted in Cincinnati showed that local hospitals, police and other services
were woefully unprepared for such a disaster, the Washington Post
reported Friday.
That Pentagon table-top simulation,
one done on paper or computer, suggested authorities were unprepared to
handle the hundreds of thousands of casualties and large numbers of dead
bodies, facing a shortage of hospital beds and emergency personnel, inadequate
equipment and training, the Post reported.
It also highlighted major legal
issues, such as whether the government has the right to quarantine contagious
people, the story said.
But the GAO and other independent
experts have played down the likelihood of a successful chemical or biological
attack killing large number of people in the United States.
“Terrorists would have to overcome
significant technical and operational challenges to successfully make and
release chemical and biological agents of sufficient quality to kill or
injure large numbers of people without substantial assistance from a foreign
government sponsor,” it said.
Governments would be reluctant
to sponsor such an attack, experts have argued, because of the risk of
massive retaliation by the U.S. government.
IN
THIS SERIES
Terrorists
Find New Tools of Fea
Anti-Terrorism
Budget
Willing
to Kill for the Sake of Killing
Many
Nations Developing Bioweapons
Types
of Chemical Weapons
Mass
Destruction Through Biology
Recent
Domestic Terrorist Events
Simulation
of Terrorist Acts
W
E B L I N K S
FBI's
National Domestic Preparedness Office
FEMA
Rapid Response Information System
GAO
report on Government Terrorism Preparations
Monterey
Institute Chronology of terrorism in the United States |
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