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On
normal days, the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Center,
located between 17th and 23rd Streets on Manhattan’s
lower West side, is jam-packed with people climbing rock walls,
swimming laps, skateboarding along flat rails, and shooting
hoops.
But
Tuesday, September 11, was anything but a normal day for the
complex — or the entire nation — as two hijacked
jets crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center,
obliterating them from the city’s skyline and turning
lower Manhattan into a war zone. On that day, within just
hours of the disaster, Chelsea Piers had become a makeshift
triage center. Inside, a warehouse was transformed into an
emergency trauma unit. Giant television lights were gathered
from the production studio to light the room. Picnic tables
draped with sheets became operating tables, 100 in all. Doctors,
nurses, and New York University medical students, a sea of
blue scrubs, waited for the injured to come pouring in.
They
never did.
Thousands
of World Trade Center workers and visitors, as well as firefighters,
police, and EMTs who arrived at the scene within minutes of
the first jet crash, never made it out, presumed dead from
the fiery blaze of the explosions or buried under the tower
floors, which collapsed like stacks of pancakes, one on top
of the other.
Nonetheless,
Chelsea Piers was prepared. In fact, the entire city was prepared.
A city of tall buildings and American symbols, New York had
been attacked before and those who worked behind the scenes
knew it could likely happen again. And so on that “stunning
and dark day,” as NBC newscaster Tom Brokaw would later
describe it, New York set in motion the emergency response
plan that it had carefully crafted after the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing. Almost as if it were only a drill and not
a real-life emergency of the magnitude that most could never
have imagined, tunnels, bridges, and surrounding streets were
shut down under the order of New York Governor George Pataki
and the direction of Mayor Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani;
command centers and triage units, like the one at Chelsea
Pier, sprung into action; backup personnel flocked to the
scene; fire and police stations communicated with one another;
security was heightened; volunteers were organized; and calm
prevailed during chaos.
This
level of readiness, say experts at the Kennedy School who
have been at the forefront of a new — and sadly, now
timely — subset of the terrorism field called “domestic
preparedness,” is not by chance.
“What
happened in New York is not a case of ‘This is a horrible
tragedy and we’re going to spring into action,’” says Arnold
Howitt, executive director of the Taubman Center for State
and Local Government and co-director of the school’s
two-year-old Executive
Session on Domestic Preparedness, which serves as a resource
for government officials interested in reducing the threat
of terrorism and minimizing the vulnerability of democratic
societies to its effects. “New York has been thinking
about this seriously since the bombing of the World Trade
Center in 1993. So while New York has responded with heroism
and extraordinary efforts that should never be forgotten,
it’s important to remember that had they not been prepared,
there could have been emergency groups running all over the
place.”
Multiple
agencies on the scene, particularly in a stressful situation,
can lead to confusion about who’s doing what. In Colorado,
for example, after two students went on a shooting spree at
Columbine High School in April 1999, 1,000 emergency responders
were gathered at the school from 6 sheriffs’ offices,
20 police departments, a dozen fire units, as well as a handful
of federal agencies. Three separate SWAT teams, each with
members who had never worked together, were inside the school,
simultaneously looking for armed gunmen wearing fatigues — a description that actually described themselves.
The
lesson from traumatic incidents, says Howitt, is that all
cities around the country — small or big — need
to be prepared. Unfortunately most, he says, are not. This
may change, of course, in the aftermath of the most recent
terrorist attack, the deadliest to date on American soil,
with more than 6,000 dead or missing.
But
prior to the latest attack, says Juliette
Kayyem, co-director of the executive session and a former
member of the National Commission on Terrorism, most people
didn’t believe it would happen to them. “Until recently,
no one viewed homeland America as a risk. Throughout most
of our history, America sat idly by and condemned terrorism,
but we were never the key target.”
Even
New York wasn’t always as prepared as it thankfully is
today. The city became more focused, as did other potential
hot spots like Chicago and Washington, DC, after the 1993
World Trade Center attack, followed two years later by the
bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City.
“This
side of the Atlantic suddenly seemed to be exposed to political
violence of the sort that the United States had escaped while
other democracies had not,” writes Harvard Professor Philip
Heymann in Terrorism and America.
Still,
as terrible as these events were, many Americans remained
complacent about domestic terrorism.
“The
World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was a shock, but a first
of its kind, a one-off. We rebuilt, we prosecuted, and we
moved on with a resurgent sense of American invulnerability,” wrote New York Times correspondent Bill Keller, one
day after the September attack. Oklahoma City, which involved
168 deaths, including many children, also didn’t serve
as a wake-up call because the terrorist was a lone wolf, a
home-grown American, not a highly organized, well-funded group
willing to die for their cause.
The
experts involved in the nation’s domestic preparedness
field, which was created during the Clinton administration
in the mid-1990s, even continued to debate the rights and
wrongs of pouring money and time into preparing for something
that most agreed might never happen again.
“The
‘likeliness’ debate was strong until Tuesday,”
says Kayyem, referring to the most recent attack. “People
said the domestic preparedness program was overfunded, a way
to justify bloated budgets. Now that debate is totally over.
Unfortunately.”
Learning
Lessons
In
many ways, that likeliness debate had already been bypassed
at the Kennedy School when Assistant Professor Richard
Falkenrath conceived the idea to start a new project in
the wake of Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center
attacks. Falkenrath, now with President Bush’s National
Security Council, was certain that the nation needed to take
preparedness seriously, so he contacted the Department of
Justice to see if it would be interested in funding a project
at the school that would help the federal government think
through how best to develop state and local government capabilities
and to integrate them into a coherent national plan for domestic
terrorism. The department was interested. Falkenrath conferred
with Howitt, who had state and local expertise, and the duo
started the executive session.
Today
the multiyear project is directed by Howitt and Kayyem and
run jointly by the Taubman Center and BCSIA. Like other executive
sessions held at the school, the project brings together hands-on
practitioners from across the country — firefighters,
police chiefs, and sheriffs — as well as mayors, medical
administrators, and military officers to develop and promote
ideas with Kennedy School faculty and staff on how state and
local government, with the support of federal agencies, can
become better prepared.
The
project, which has met four times and may meet again in November,
has started to disseminate its findings through a series of
policy papers and articles. It also uses a Harvard original,
the case study, “to help us figure out gaps in the system
and where to plug them,” says Howitt. One case study
on the LA riots following the Rodney King verdict, for example,
showed the group how confusing a situation can become when
it unexpectedly grows violent. A case on a 1998 Anthrax hoax
in Southern California raised the question of how to balance
public safety with a need for public reassurance. Two new
case studies have been commissioned for future study, including
one on Chicago’s heat wave epidemic in 1995, and one
on terrorist scares as the clock counted down to the year
2000.
So
how will the latest attacks change the course of the school’s
project, as well as the nation’s overall domestic preparedness
program? Many say it’s too soon to tell. But most agree
that there has been a sea change in America and that in preparing
for terrorism, the question will no longer be “Why?”
but “How?”
For
starters, New York City’s strategy will most likely be
studied and used in other areas of the country.
“Some
of the issues that New York faces are very different than
what other cities have to face, but when everyone has time
to catch their breaths and assess what went right and wrong
in New York, then I think the city will become the model for
the rest of the country on how to be prepared,” says
Kayyem.
That
includes making emergency preparedness a priority, say Howitt,
noting that after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Giuliani
aggressively devoted money and resources into creating a central
emergency management office, geared toward improving coordination
and communication among city agencies who often have differing
roles during disasters and may rarely ever work together during
non-disasters. The city also recruited top emergency response
managers and actively trained personnel at all levels.
Key
to this model, says Howitt, is that the city wisely invested
in what is known in the field as the “all-hazard”
approach to emergency response. The idea is to prepare “first
responders” — fire fighters, police officers, EMTs
and other medical personnel first on the scene — to respond
to terrorism the same way they’d respond to other disasters,
such as floods, hurricanes, toxic spills, plane crashes, and
fires.
“The
reality is that local personnel often need to be self- sufficient
for at least 24 hours before the feds come in,” says
Leslee Stein-Spencer, chief of the Division of Emergency Medical
Services and Highway Safety of the Illinois Department of
Public Health and a member of the executive session.
In
Cobb County, Georgia, for instance, the fire department employs
the all-hazards approach to handle everyday hazardous material
accidents.
“Our
haz mat team — our lead responders — responds to
calls for accident-released materials all the time,”
says Fire Chief Rebecca Denlinger, another executive session
member. “It doesn’t matter to them if it’s
accidental or intentional from a terrorist threat.”
Therefore,
creating a “generalized emergency response system”
makes sense, says Howitt. “It’s prudent to improve
the response capability for any disaster response so that
the probability of it being ‘wasted’ on an event
that may never happen is less likely.”
In
addition, Denlinger would like to see the creation of one
nationwide command center. “It’s apparent to me
that unless all responsible agencies have an understanding
of a similar command structure, we won’t understand or
work well with each other,” she says. “We’ll
be speaking different languages and have different expectations
when we all arrive on the scene.”
It’s
also important, says Stein-Spencer, to customize training
to meet particular needs. Under the 1996 Defense Against Weapons
of Mass Destruction Act (commonly known as the Nunn-Lugar-Dominici
legislation), a week of terrorist response training is provided
to state and local first responders. For those in the medical
field, this time frame is often too lengthy for hectic schedules,
particularly in areas facing a shortage of nurses. So some
states, like Illinois, have come up with their own training
program.
“Hospitals
have been the weak link when it comes to preparedness,”
says Stein-Spencer, who acknowledged that while New York medical
personnel did a great job, that part of the equation was partially
untested, due in part to the low number of casualties that
might otherwise have overwhelmed the system. “When it
comes to a mass casualty incident, if you just train people
for weapons of mass destruction, you won’t get buy-in.
But if you tie it to training for other potential disasters,
there’s more interest.” Her group created a shorter
program (four hours) that travels directly to the user. To
date, they’ve trained about 700 nurses, doctors, and
EMTs, and have produced a CD that hospitals can use for those
who can’t make the training. Following
the New York incident, she says, there was a surge of new
interest in the training.
Executive
session member Frannie Edwards-Winslow, director of the Office
of Emergency Services for the city of San Jose, California,
has also been using the all-hazards approach for years, in
part because her earthquake-prone state understands all too
well the importance of being ready. “It’s in our
culture,” she says. Still, she acknowledges that after
watching what happened in New York, she now sees holes in
her city’s planning.
“Based
on what happened, we now realize we need to stock more equipment.
Hepa Filter [face masks], for example,” she says. “The
police and firefighters have this equipment and know how to
use it, but what about public works officials or heavy equipment
operators? An engineer, instead of the usual shirt, tie, and
pen clip, will be given goggles, gloves, and a filter. Because
of New York, we’re now looking at who really would be
first responders. It won’t just be fire, police, and
medical, but going further and further into the city’s
professions. We now realize we’ll be taking those people
and putting them into new, hostile environments that they
aren’t trained for.”
A
New Focus?
Lessons
from New York also go beyond training methods and equipment
needs. They include the larger debate of what kind of threat
to focus on, say executive session experts.
“We’ve
spent so much time thinking about biological, chemical, and
radiological agents when we think about weapons of mass destruction,”
says Kayyem. “We thought the conventional terrorist days
— the 1970s hijacking style — were over. But New
York shows they’re not. We thought that terrorists would
ratchet up their means of attack, but as we’ve seen,
these old methods can and do have a tremendous impact. We
need to rethink these conventional methods of mass destruction.”
According to a 30-year retrospective report on terrorism put
out by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, the vast majority of terrorist attacks worldwide
continue to be carried out using conventional methods, such
as bombs, firearms, and limited-range rockets, compared to
chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, collectively
known as weapons of mass destruction. The report says that
while cases involving weapons of mass destruction have increased
since 1995, most incidents have been hoaxes.
Still,
considering the enormous destructive possibilities —
hundreds of thousands in one attack — unconventional
threats can’t be dismissed. Biological warfare, for example,
mostly involves living germs that are usually odorless, colorless,
and highly potent. They can also spread easily and seep undetected
onto airplanes, across sports stadiums, and throughout cities.
Once detected, there wouldn’t be a defined area to respond
to or quarantine. And affected individuals would slowly develop
symptoms after exposure, many like coughs and fever that are
similar to other diseases.
“Unlike
a bomb blast, a biological attack has no epicenter,”
says Howitt. “By the time a bio-attack is discovered,
the victims, who might conceivably be contagious themselves,
may have spread out throughout an area and perhaps gone many
other places. And it could take days, even weeks, to detect.”
Joshua Lederberg, author of Biological Weapons, published
by Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA),
says that the medical community will play the biggest role
if an attack does happen.
This
worries Stein-Spencer. “You won’t have first responders.
Instead, people will slowly go to their HMOs or hospitals
complaining of various ailments,” she says. “Unless
you have an astute medical person who can recognize what’s
happened, then you could really have a major problem. Nationwide,
we’re all struggling with this.” With the renewed
interest of medical personnel in her state of being trained
following the recent attack, she says they will be adding
bioterrorism to their training program.
“It’s
been an awakening for people,” she says, “so if
you have an opening, you go for it.”
Luckily,
biological agents are hard to weaponize and incredibly unstable,
says Robyn Pangi MPP 2000, a research associate with the executive
session. “This is one speculation as to why they’re
rarely used,” she says. “Anthrax, for example, degrades
very quickly under certain environmental conditions. In New
York, the fire from the jet explosions was so hot that it
melted the steel beams and would certainly have destroyed
a biological agent, had it been aboard the plane.”
In
addition, says Kayyem, it’s clear that future talks need
to go from lofty and abstract, to concrete and real.
“It
was much easier before this to think of terrorist attacks
abstractly. We would talk about ‘worse-case scenarios’
during our executive sessions and it was easy to be objective
and passive,” Kayyem says. “This shows that you
can talk about issues of national security and state action,
which seem so heady, but when it comes down to it, the people
involved really are the East Side firefighters and others
like them.”
Indeed says Graham Allison, director of BCSIA and a member
of the executive session, “The success of the executive
session lies in its recognition that the most effective counterterrorism
strategy is one that focuses on the needs of state and local
responders and how they will work with the federal government
to ensure the safety of its citizens.”
Clearly, the danger that firefighters and other first responders
face during disasters became all the more apparent after the
recent attack on the World Trade Center. The “golden
hour” — the window of time after a disaster strikes
when emergency responders first on the scene can make the
greatest difference and save the most lives — became
the deadly hour for nearly 400 of New York City’s firefighters,
police, and medical personnel who rushed to the towers within
minutes of the first blast. Jack
Fanning, chief of hazardous materials operations for the New
York City Fire Department, was one of those who perished when
the towers buckled. Fanning, a 30-year-veteran of the department,
was a member of the Kennedy School’s Executive Session
on Domestic Preparedness.
“Jack
was an active and valuable contributor to the work of the
session from its inception and one of the people in New York
City government who was working to prepare for the possibilities
of terrorism,” says Howitt. “He died tragically
trying to save others from the reality of the terrorist attack
whose threat he had long sought to avert.”
Seize
the Moment
As
New York and the nation continue trying to absorb the reality
of this latest and most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil,
experts like Kennedy School Professor Ash Carter see it as
an opportune moment.
“We
need to use this moment of public attention and concern to
prepare the country better for this kind of threat,”
says Carter, a member of the executive session and a former
assistant secretary of defense for international security
policy. For instance, “There is talk of increasing airline
security to make it harder for terrorists to turn airliners
into giant cruise missiles. The FAA has long succeeded in
keeping guns and bombs off airplanes, but it is impossible
to keep sharp-edged metal objects off planes. Prison inmates
have demonstrated over centuries that a knife can be fashioned
out of just about anything. Airline passengers cannot be asked
to board naked. The key to preventing the type of takeover
that apparently occurred is to put an armored Kevlar door
behind the cockpit, possibly to arm the air crew, and to add
software permitting pilots and controllers to lock the autopilot
so the plane cannot be maneuvered if it is taken over.”
The
moment can also be used to drive home what Howitt and the
other members of the executive session will continue to focus
on: making sure everyone is prepared.
“All places have industry or some historical monuments
that could be vulnerable,” says Howitt. “Any particular
place in the United States still has a low probability of
being attacked by terrorists, but it’s prudent and wise
to have a good emergency management system in place.”
This
is particularly revealing this week, says lecturer Jessica
Stern PhD 1992, a member of the executive session and
author of The Ultimate Terrorist, because “We
will never live in a completely risk-free society. We can’t
protect America from everything. We do things that make the
world angry. It’s clear our enemies know that it would
be hard to take us on the battlefield and win, but on American
soil, we’re vulnerable.”
“Clearly, there’s no foolproof antiterrorism strategy.
We need to take that as a given,” Kayyem adds. “Then
you ask, what can we do? The kinds of things the domestic
preparedness program and the Kennedy School are trying to
address, ultimately, we hope, will assist in curtailing terrorism
and its affects.”
Click
here
for a list of the most recent reports and papers from the
executive session.
photo: AP photo/Gino Domenico
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