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TOPOFF Report Due in Several Months
It will take up to six months to prepare the final report on what emergency officials learned in last week’s TOPOFF 3 drill in New Jersey and Connecticut, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, April 8). “This is not over until we fully capture all of the lessons learned, in about a four-to-six month process,” said Robert Stephan, director of the Incident Management Group at the U.S. Homeland Security Department. “This phase is perhaps the most significant phase, showing us where we did well and where we need to make improvement.” Problems included a lack of protective suits and antibiotics at hospitals in both states, radio failures in Connecticut that forced firefighters to use their cell phones to communicate and a delay in setting up road blocks in New Jersey, the New York Times reported Saturday. New Jersey officials said the response there to a mock bioterror incident displayed the need for maintaining communication between state and local officials, and for developing an autopsy facility that could house people killed by a pathogen, AP reported. “You don’t take sick and perhaps contaminated people to a facility like a hospital where people are trying to get well,” said Attorney General Peter Harvey. States should press for federal legislation allowing states to be declared an emergency disaster area following a biological attack, said acting New Jersey Governor Richard Codey (Rose Cirianni, Associated Press, April 8). Some officials said the exercise should have better tested hospitals’ and authorities’ ability to detect attacks before they occur, the Times reported. “There was too much focus on first-responder reaction,” said Representative Rob Simmons (R-Conn.). “To deal with an incident after the fact is not our priority. Our first priority is to prevent an incident.” Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies had been receiving simulated intelligence on an attack since March, and blocked potential mock attacks, Homeland Security officials said (Kocieniewski/Lipton, New York Times, April 9). The organized drill, by its very nature, could not offer the surprise and large-scale fear that would follow an actual incident, experts said. “It’s like any drill. You get advance notice, make sure the key people are not on vacation and line up your ducks in a row,” Joseph King, an associate professor of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told Reuters. “An actual event is a different issue,” he said. Potential terrorist attacks on the United States will not necessarily involve weapons of mass destruction,” said Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at John Jay College. “The assumption has been there are atomic, biological, chemical and nuclear risks that put society on edge,” he said. “A future attack might be much different.” “People that hate government or hate America are likely to turn to something cheap and surprising … like an attack on our poorly protected technology infrastructure,” McCrie added (Larry Fine, Reuters, April 7).
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