Homing in
Although the federal government extended its terrorism fighting efforts to include cities and counties after Sept. 11, 2001, for the most part, local governments remained at the bottom of the food chain. “Most of the first year was spent trying to piece together how we, as a nation, were going to prevent, detect and respond to the next major attack,” says George Vinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation counter-terrorism expert and former director of the California Office of Homeland Security (COHS). “The last three years have given us enough time to put the money where it will do the most good, but we still have some ways to go.”
The federal government has allocated more than $7.2 billion in grants to local and state governments since 2002, but they have seen only a fraction of it. In fact, more than $5 billion remains unspent, according to a Congressional report last year. “Millions of dollars were wasted because a lot of time was spent fighting over homeland security funding rather than doing the hard work of constructing realistic assessments, strategies and plans for protecting the country from another actual attack,” Vinson says.
In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Congress began to unclog the money pipeline to local communities. Until then, states had administered the DHS grant money, but the agency now gives a substantial portion directly to local communities through its Urban Areas Security Initiative. Under that program, local governments are set to receive $850 million for fiscal year 2005, an increase of more than $250 million from fiscal year 2003. Meanwhile, states have been allocated approximately $1 billion in DHS grants for the current fiscal year — half of 2003’s allocation.
Now that local governments have millions of homeland security dollars, they are moving beyond purchasing safety and communications equipment. Some are assessing their critical assets to determine which ones to protect and how to protect them, and how to manage a disaster if prevention measures fail.
Local prevention efforts
Operation Archangel is one local program that has used federal funds to help prevent terrorism. Established last year by the city and county of Los Angeles, the Web-based operation is being field tested and has identified which critical assets are potential targets and created operational plans to protect them.
“Much of the money spent has been on the response side, [which is] unacceptable in the long-haul,” says Tom McDonald, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department and Operation Archangel’s creator. “A sound prevention strategy should be grounded in having a full knowledge of your critical assets and the attendant vulnerabilities and being able to share this knowledge with those who need to know when they need to know it.”
Operation Archangel helps public officials recognize patterns among their most important assets. The system hosts site-specific, pre-incident enhancement plans, buffer zone protection plans, response information folders and site-specific, post-occurrence response plans. For instance, intelligence may identify assets with certain characteristics that are more likely to be targeted, such as industrial gas chemical plants with more than 100 employees. Pattern recognition in Archangel allows incident management staff to view a list of those assets and provide operational plans to protect them. Before Archangel was created, many critical assets were not cataloged, while others were listed on paper spread among many locations. As a result, first responders did not have ready access to that information, which hindered emergency response coordination.
Although Archangel originally was conceived to help prevent terrorism, it has been used to identify other threats such as earthquakes, fires and floods. “We’ve taken an all-hazards approach. The vulnerabilities and outcomes are similar,” McDonald says. For instance, the system was used to monitor California’s recent wildfires and provided real-time information to the responders on the ground.
Operation Archangel leverages cutting-edge technology, combining geographic information systems, data mining and interoperability technologies into a coherent system. “Operation Archangel is created for first planners and first responders by first planners and first responders,” McDonald says.
Initially funded by a $3 million Justice Department grant, the Archangel project received support from the city and county of Los Angeles, DHS and COHS. “We’re following Archangel’s progress closely,” says Kelly Huston, assistant deputy director of COHS. “If and when the field tests are completed successfully, we’ll coordinate its statewide use by other cities and counties,” he says. “If we deploy Archangel statewide, we’ll have achieved a seamless integration of critical asset management capability across jurisdictional borders.”
Because the project is funded completely by federal grants, any jurisdiction in any state can use it for free. “The Archangel is net-centric. Therefore, all a jurisdiction needs is a computer with an Internet connection,” McDonald says.
Managing incidents
While the Archangel system specializes in critical asset management, other Web-based systems specialize in incident management as well as hosting critical asset management capabilities. The San Diego Police Department used DHS grants to purchase E Team from a Los Angeles-based company of the same name to use in its emergency operations center. “We leverage technology to maximize our ability to respond,” says Bill Maheu, San Diego’s executive assistant chief of police. “The first thing you’ll now notice in our emergency operation center is how quiet it is. Now we get updates at the same time as an incident unfolds. Before we deployed the system, our emergency management center was loud with people shouting updates across the room and on the phone, occasionally putting sticky notes on each other’s monitors. This distracted us and kept us from responding quickly to an unfolding situation.”
As illustrated by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the ability of government agencies to communicate with each other during crises remains critical. “As new technologies proliferate, we need to find ways to make them talk to each other,” says Matt Walton, chairman of the Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC), the largest non-profit international association focused on developing Web services interoperability standards for emergency management data exchange.
In 2003, EIC released the Common Alert Protocol (CAP), the first internationally recognized standard in the area. CAP’s primary ability is to unify how warning signals are sent from the nation’s alert and warning systems. If a remote sensor detects abnormal levels of radioactivity, CAP will send text, voice and data messages to predetermined locations, such as emergency operations centers and responders. Using CAP, the sensors would communicate directly with wireless devices, radios and television.
In January 2005, EIC became the first non-governmental body recognized by DHS to develop and promulgate data standards to support the agency’s National Incident Management System (NIMS). Originally created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, NIMS standardizes how incidence managers and first responders handle domestic events.
Despite the technological advancements in fighting terrorism, many cities and counties still remain vulnerable to bomb attacks. While local ordinances might specify setbacks from buildings to the property wall, building codes for setback distances to lessen bomb damage usually do not exist. Tod Rittenhouse with New York-based Weidlinger Associates and Joe Smith with Vicksburg, Miss.-based ARA agree that blast vulnerability assessments are necessary to protect buildings from a bombing.
“What’s needed is a credible threat analysis for cities and counties,” says Rittenhouse, an expert on blast engineering. “We can then determine the probable bomb damage levels, limit access to the area and harden the particular structures accordingly.” Such vulnerability assessments have been part of federal design specifications, known as the Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC), for the past two decades. To protect their own communities, cities and counties could add the UFC standards to their local building codes.
Studying the problems
The growing interest in vulnerability assessment and emergency management has created a new demand for a separate area of college-level study. “The profession of emergency management was rapidly changing and developing long before September 2001,” says Mike Martinet, executive director of the Office of Disaster Management, Area G, which serves 750,000 people in 14 cities throughout Los Angeles County’s South Bay Region. Martinet is completing work on his Master’s degree in Emergency Services Administration.
“The job market demand for emergency management professionals is driving our growth,” says Paul Bott, department chair for Occupational Studies at California State University in Long Beach. “We started with only 40 Master of Science level students at two sites prior to 9/11. Now, we have over 400 students at 15 sites, with 25 to 30 graduates per semester with an MS degree in Emergency Services Administration.”
Indeed, the homeland security picture may be coming into focus for local governments. Certainly cities and counties have a great role to play in protecting America against terrorism, including gathering intelligence. “Local law enforcement and fire departments can play a major role by becoming more aware of what’s going on in their local communities,” says Dwight Helmick, former California Homeland Security Chief. “Fire departments already inspect the businesses in their jurisdictions for code compliance. So, they are in a perfect position to spot suspect activities.”
Helmick and Vinson also urge local law enforcement officials to help establish better neighborhood watch programs. “They should encourage the folks to pick up the phone and report anything that looks out of place. This is what prevention is all about,” Vinson says. “It’s no secret that the radical terrorists are looking for the catastrophic hit. While we can’t always outguess them, we are smart enough to minimize their damage.”
N. Tayfun Amur is a consultant based in Orange County, Calif.
Terror casualties grow
According to U.S. State Department figures, a persistent stream of terrorism directed toward the United States has occurred since the mid-1980s. Its research also shows a sharp drop in the number of terrorism incidents since 1995, Sept. 11, 2001, not withstanding. Surprisingly, the same data indicate a sharp increase in casualty levels for the same period. In other words, the attacks are getting deadlier.
— N. Tayfun Amur
Year | Number of events | Deaths | Wounded | Attacks on U.S. interests |
---|---|---|---|---|
2003 | 208 | 625 | 3,646 | 84 |
2002 | 202 | 725 | 2,013 | 77 |
2001 | 355 | 3,296 | 2,283 | 219 |
2000 | 426 | 405 | 791 | 200 |
1999 | 395 | 233 | 706 | 169 |
1998 | 274 | 741 | 5,952 | 111 |
1997 | 304 | 221 | 693 | 123 |
1996 | 296 | 314 | 2,652 | 73 |
1995 | 440 | 163 | 6,291 | 90 |
1994 | 322 | 314 | 663 | 66 |
1993 | 431 | 109 | 1,393 | 88 |
1992 | 363 | 93 | 636 | 142 |
1991 | 565 | 102 | 233 | 308 |
1990 | 437 | 200 | 675 | 197 |
1989 | 375 | 193 | 397 | 193 |
1988 | 605 | 407 | 1,131 | 185 |
1987 | 665 | 612 | 2272 | 149 |
1986 | 612 | 604 | 1717 | 204 |
1985 | 635 | 825 | 1,217 | 170 |
>SOURCE: “Transnational Terrorism: An Economic Analysis,” by Todd Sandler, School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and Walter Enders, Department of Economics, Finance and Legal Studies at the University of Alabama, August 2004. Based on information from the U.S. Department of State, “Patterns of Global Terrorism” (1988-2003) and tables provided to Todd Sandler in 1988 by the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism. |