Preparing for Terror A basement command center surrounded by Smyrna farmland will become Mission Control in the event of a terrorist emergency in Delaware. Delaware Today, September 2002 Jamie Turner's 13-year-old daughter has a softball game tomorrow, and you can bet your life he'll be there. Nothing short of a catastrophe could keep him out of the stands. But he'll bring along his pager just in case, because Jamie Turner, director of the Delaware Emergency Management Agency, is a slave to catastrophes. When they strike, he gets the call. And if disaster does strike tomorrow, this is what will happen. Picture NASA's Mission Control Center, buried in a little crater surrounded by farmland along Route 1 outside Smyrna. The lights in this hi-tech, theater-style room are perpetually dimmed to reduce the glare on the television screens that line the walls. It is in this command center in the belly of DEMA's headquarters where the first calls will filter in. If it is a true catastrophe, with a number of lives suspected lost or at risk, the Emergency Operations Center will be activated and calls will quickly go out to the state's top emergency decision-makers, including Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, Secretary of Public Safety James L. Ford, as well as Turner and his DEMA staff, if they're not already there directing the command center. One floor above DEMA's Mission Control is a state-of-the-art conference room with a long executive-style conference table and a panoramic view of the goings-on below. In this room, the Governor's Office, the decision-makers will convene soon after receiving their phone calls. This is the room Minner was rushed to when she got the news about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Representatives from the National Guard, the Department of Transportation, the Red Cross, local hospitals, the Army Corps of Engineers, and about two dozen other state and local agencies will be summoned to the command center and will set up communication between DEMA and their respective organizations. They'll be managed by a dozen DEMA employees in a tiny room directly behind the command center called the Operations Center, lined with three-ring binders that spell out detailed procedures for nearly every emergency imaginable. These employees will in turn be advised by a dozen scientists and technical advisers in another tiny room called the Tactical Assistance Center, which is lined with maps of nuclear facilities and other related areas of concern. And above them all, sitting around the sleek conference table in the Governor's Office, a team of high-level advisers will make recommendations to the governor about a plan of action. Should schools and businesses be closed? Should traffic be diverted? What emergency services should be deployed? Should a state of emergency be declared? Minner, ultimately, must give the final call: "Do it," or "Don't do it." This scene, regularly rehearsed at DEMA during mandated emergency-preparedness drills, played out last September on the day of the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Supervisory Planner David Hake Sr. was chatting with some National Guardsmen about emergency equipment when he saw the attack on television. "We were watching CNN in the break room and we saw a plane crash into the second tower," he says. He rushed upstairs; the director was already on the phone with the governor's staff. Within minutes, representatives from the military and major state organizations were summoned to DEMA's control center, and by mid-afternoon, 75 to 80 emergency personnel were at their communication stations. "Once we all realized we were under attack, there was a bit of shock," says Glen Gillespie, deputy director. "I fully and earnestly believed I would never see this country attacked in my lifetime." The governor closed schools and all non-essential government offices and DEMA began staffing its rumor control hotline with several operators. Ambulances were deployed to New Jersey to help with the rescue efforts. Hake and Gillespie agree that it was the busiest and the most taxing single day of their lengthy careers. And they recognize that it could happen again at any time. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have raised public interest and concern about emergency preparedness on the state and federal levels in the event of another terrorist attack. Shielding against future attacks has been one of Minner's and the Delaware legislature's high priorities. Several bills and a resolution related to preventing terrorism have been brought through the house and senate in the last year. They include S.B. 371 (passed), which alters the code related to the Freedom of Information Act to protect information that could help terrorists; H.B. 377 (passed), which clarifies the government's emergency procedures and authority in the event of a public health emergency; H.C.R. 36 (passed), which encourages Congress to pass a bill requiring criminal background checks for all applicants to pilot-training and aircraft-maintenance schools; and S.B. 288 (passed) and H.B. 375, which add new offenses related to terrorism to Delaware's books. All of this legislation builds on a wealth of planning and proactivity by DEMA officials against potential terrorist acts. The agency classifies likely terrorist acts into five major types: biological, chemical, nuclear, incendiary and explosive. It has rehearsed scenarios and established detailed guidelines for dealing with all five types. The anthrax scare that occurred after Sept. 11 was an example of biological terrorism. Other possible biological weapons include smallpox, plague, or even salmonella, a common type of food poisoning. Luckily, Turner says, for "most of the biological [weapons], they've got antidotes." But not all antidotes are in adequate supply. In June 2001, a two-day federal bioterrorism exercise code-named "Dark Winter" was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., and the results were bleak. Former senior government officials took part in the role-playing exercise in which a fictional smallpox attack takes place in the United States. With only enough vaccine available to inoculate about 5 percent of the U.S. population, the smallpox quickly spreads throughout the country. As the exercise closed, thousands of deaths occurred, and the final projection shows that one out of every three Americans would die from the disease. Every official who participated in "Dark Winter" agreed that much work still needs to be done to safeguard Americans from bioterrorism, particularly in the area of vaccine availability. For chemical attacks, DEMA has prepared evacuation and shelter-in-place plans, but its most important weapon in combating these types of attacks is preventing access to the chemicals. Turner says all of Delaware's chemical facilities operate under stringent security, making it extremely difficult for potential terrorists to get their hands on large quantities of hazardous chemicals. Turner is also somewhat optimistic about handling nuclear threats. "We've got two nuclear generating stations out on the Delaware River," he says. "But since Three Mile Island, there are standards. It's going to be pretty hard to have a problem at a nuclear facility." Even so, these facilities aren't taking chances. Much of the information related to the nuclear plants, including the amount of uranium on site, is no longer public information because of increased concerns about terrorism. Incendiary weapons are those that cause fires, such as firebombs. These types of terrorists acts are usually contained to a single building, Turner says, and Delaware's fire departments have been trained to combat them. Explosive weapons include bombs and detonation devices, such as the explosives used in the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing or in the recent suicide bombings in Israel. However, Turner says, Delaware has never had a problem with explosive acts. "When was the last bombing in the state of Delaware? I couldn't tell you," he says. (For the record, John D'Angelo, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, says 24 bombing incidents occurred in Delaware between 1993 and 1997, the most current dates available in ATF statistics.) In addition to strengthening preparedness measures within Delaware's emergency-response community since Sept. 11, DEMA has begun outreach programs to educate residen