A homeland readier for 'high' alert
Government raises threat level as war looms, but agencies and cities have been preparing for months.
"Hello, 911? This is an emergency!"
As US troops head into war, the effort to protect the American homeland is also ratcheted up, probably into the largest effort since the Sept. 11 attacks.
How well is the nation prepared to respond to emergency calls?
The short answer, experts say, is that America has improved its ability to respond to World Trade Center-size emergencies and smaller attacks. While the improvement is spotty, the progress was underscored this week by efforts that came as the US moved to "high" terror alert.
Federal officials stepped up security everywhere from sea-coast harbors to airports to Midwest feed lots to cyberspace. Some nuclear plants are ringed with armed guards. In New York, television stations have police outside to prevent takeovers.
Intelligence officials are taking aggressive and sometimes controversial steps to interview thousands of Iraqi Americans and carefully screen asylum seekers from some Muslim nations.
Local and state officials, meanwhile, prepared to respond to any attacks that do occur. Cities and states have been hard at work for months to better prepare. Some examples:
• Maryland is installing a new communications system so local police and fire units can talk to the state police on their radios and respond more efficiently to emergencies.
• Denver and six counties around it have stocked up with antibiotics and chemical weapons' antidotes.
• Detroit has lined up "citizen radio patrols," mainly ham-radio operators, to help get information through in case other communications systems fail.
"Pre-9/11 we were a D; now, we're a C," says Clark Staten, senior national security analyst at Emergency Response Institute in Chicago. "When new money gets to the local responders, we will probably move to a B."
Some of that money should start to flow relatively soon. In the fiscal 2003 budget, just passed by Congress, some $1.4 billion was set aside for homeland security. Only last week, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced $750 million for firefighters to help respond to terrorism incidents.
"We have made significant progress," says Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "Now, we have to improve the coordination between state, local and federal government."
And, according to two reports released Tuesday by the General Accounting Office, there are still some major uncertainties regarding security around chemical plants and food processing. For example, the GAO cites a federal EPA report that 123 chemical facilities located throughout the nation have a "worst-case" scenario where more than 1 million people could be at risk of exposure to a cloud of toxic gas.
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