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Cities absorb lessons of simulated nightmare

By Fred Bayles, Debbie Howlett and Laura Parker, USA TODAY CHICAGO

The 600 firefighters who played themselves in a terrorism drill here Thursday learned a lot about gridlock.

As they raced to respond to the mock collapse of a four-story building and the simulated release of a toxic substance from a chemical plant, they were kept in their trucks for about 20 minutes while officials from other agencies determined whether it was safe for them to enter the hazardous zone.

"We're experiencing some procedural gridlock," said Jay Reardon, chief of the Northbrook, Ill., Fire Department. But Reardon said he was encouraged to learn that firefighters would be kept from rushing into unknown dangers. "There are benefits in waiting and not being so aggressive," he said.

That was one of the many lessons officials said they learned from the extensive drills staged this week here and in Seattle to improve the nation's ability to respond to simultaneous terrorist attacks.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, whose 31/2-month-old department prepared the scripts and financed the $16 million exercise, flew here Thursday and pronounced the drills a success.

"If we are going to make our responsive systems stronger, we first have to identify our strengths and weaknesses," he said. Ridge declined to cite specific failings uncovered by the exercise. "We're going to put everything under a very critical microscope," he said. "That process begins first thing tomorrow."

In Seattle on Monday, emergency workers scrambled to respond to a simulated detonation of a radiological "dirty bomb." The plot in Chicago was more elaborate. On Tuesday, hundreds of people began showing up at hospitals complaining of flulike symptoms. Officials announced later that a shadowy terrorist group was suspected of releasing batches of pneumonic plague at O'Hare International Airport, at the city's train station and during a hockey game at the United Center arena.

The staged disasters multiplied Thursday with the building collapse, the chemical release and a simulated collision at Midway Airport of a Boeing 737 and a medical helicopter. The Midway drill was an exercise the city performs every three years; it was timed to be part of the terrorism drill. The day concluded with a "raid" on a suspected bioweapons laboratory.

"The city has performed well under extremely difficult circumstances it was presented with the past couple of days," Ridge said.

But some experts on terrorism said the drills were too scripted and not realistic enough to expose weaknesses in the nation's emergency response network.

"It is not helpful to design something that works," said Matthew Lippman, a criminal justice professor at the University of Chicago who teaches a course on terrorism. "If you want to see what the problem is, you have to find out what doesn't work."

He said the biological attack portrayed in the drill could kill many more people than the 2,000 deaths scripted. That level of sudden death would create chaos across the city, not orderly lines of people seeking treatment, he said.

But officials in both Seattle and Chicago said the exercises taught them lessons they had not anticipated.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said he encountered a stumbling point when trying to decide how to advise the public about the degree of radiation contamination in the city.

In a real dirty bomb attack, residents would have to be told whether to evacuate or stay inside. Nickels said he found himself staring at documents about radiation that were all but impossible to decipher.

"What I got were these maps that had these big green blobs on them with these mathematical models," he said. "I was pushing the health folks to give me something in English. We ended up improvising, calling on some local folks to give me an example. They said, 'This area would be the equivalent to having half a dental X-ray.' "

That was a description Nickels said he could communicate to the public.

Seattle has had more time than Chicago to assess challenges raised by the drills:

• How does the city deal with downtown commuters who have been told to temporarily stay inside their office buildings? When it's safe for them to leave, does bus traffic resume? Which roads are open? Who decides when to reopen a bridge connecting downtown to a neighborhood across the bay when the city owns the bridge and the state owns the access ramps?

• How does the city control public fear about radiation?

• How should contaminated water, used to wash radiation residue off victims and rescue workers, be disposed of?

Nickels said there are limits to how realistic a drill can be.

"You can't spring this on a city" without advance notice, he said. "You would cause panic. But it was fairly realistic. I did feel adrenaline at times. It did put you in a place where you were thinking through these decisions very carefully."

Noticias relacionadas:

* Artículo: Terrorists' most likely weapon here? Bombs (20.05)
* Simulacro de evacuación en el Puerto de Santander (20.05)

Fuente: USA TODAY
16/05/2003

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