Low Terror Risk, High Consequences Seen for Nebraska

By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The city of Scottsbluff, Neb., stands hundreds of miles from the state’s metropolitan centers and halfway across the country from the targets of the Sept. 11 attacks (see GSN, March 10, 2004).

Farmland surrounds the community of less than 15,000 in the far western end of the state.  One main street runs through the small downtown of locally owned businesses and buildings that top out at a few stories.  There are no major financial institutions, no crucial military complexes and no centers of power.

Scottsbluff is not going to be placed at the top of any list of probable terrorism targets.  However, in the wake of the 2001 terrorist strikes and the anthrax mailings that followed quickly afterward, no community of any size wants to be left unready for an unlikely but devastating event.

The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure largely rural states away from the coasts.  While distribution of homeland security funds continues to be a sore point for policy-makers from higher-threat areas (see GSN, July 16), those inside Nebraska say history has proven that there is no predicting where terrible acts of violence will occur.

“You just never know what’s coming next with these guys.  They’ve surprised us a couple times in the past with their tactics and techniques,” said Sgt. First Class Chris Rathe, communications team chief for the 72nd Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team.  “Anything could happen.”

With that idea in mind, the Lincoln-based National Guard unit gathered this fall with Scottsbluff firefighters outside the city’s Monument Mall to test their joint ability to respond to an incident involving an unknown but deadly substance.

The exercise began with a 911 call that brought two city rescue workers to a vacant Sears outlet store, which until that morning contained little more than a mock, multicolored Volkswagen Beetle and human-size candy cane Christmas decorations. 

The firefighters found two people — one a National Guardsman in the role of a victim, the other a mannequin — overcome by chemical fumes.  They began treating the victims, under the watch of three National Guard “observer-controllers” directing the exercise.

“Geez, I’m starting to get a little lightheaded here,” said firefighter Ryan Lohr.

“You are.  Here you go,” responded National Guard Sgt. Nick Curto, handing Lohr a card indicating that the drill scenario called for the firefighter to himself become sick.

The department’s response to the crisis quickly escalated.  Firefighters using breathing apparatus were inside the building first, forcing their way into a storage area where they found another mannequin slumped over a small makeshift chemical set.  The firefighters retreated outside for decontamination, replaced by two colleagues wearing full-body protective gear who confirmed that the man at the desk was dead and that chemical vapor was spreading around the store.

Less than an hour after the first alert, the Fire Department called for backup from the 72nd, one of the National Guard units being organized in every U.S. state to support local responders faced with an unconventional weapons incident.  The first team members arrived little more than an hour later and began conferring with firefighters.

The action slowed down at that point, intentionally.  The National Guard unit’s job is not to rescue victims of a WMD incident — which should occur before they arrive — but to keep a bad situation from becoming worse. 

“When we get into a situation, it’s not the time to do anything quick.  If we hurry up too much, that’s how mistakes are made,” said Lt. Col. Donald Kneifl, team commander.  A deliberate response ensures the threat is correctly identified and that victims receive the appropriate treatment, he said.

Combined teams of firefighters and National Guard personnel over a period of hours twice more entered the contaminated area to further assess the situation and collect samples for analysis.  Emergency workers outside coordinated the activity and prepared to treat anyone who became sick.

It would ultimately be found that the laboratory was the work of “Barney Gumble” — named for the often inebriated “Simpsons” character — a recently laid-off chemistry professor who intended to use a sarin nerve agent derivative against his former employer.  The exercise ended poorly for Gumble, the dead mannequin at the desk, but well for everyone else as the threat was contained.

“I believe that the training session … went extremely well,” said Capt. Troy Shoemaker, HAZMAT coordinator for the Scottsbluff Fire Department.  “It was a learning experience from the planning of the exercise to the actual conducting of the exercise.”

Shoemaker and his counterparts were training for an event they, of course, hope never happens.  Residing in a predominantly rural state with few obvious targets for terrorism, their hopes are more likely than not to be met.

“When you multiply threat times vulnerability times consequence, the threat is quite a bit higher in the urban areas,” said Brian Jackson, associate director for the homeland security program at the RAND Corp.

From the outside, at least, nothing about Nebraska stands out that would give it a significant profile for terrorists.  It is the 16th largest U.S. state but has a population of not quite 1.8 million, less than the New York City borough of Queens, and features no national monument such as Mount Rushmore that could attract the wrong sort of attention.

Much of the populations is focused in and around two midsize cities, Omaha and Lincoln, neither of which is included among the 45 urban areas considered by the Homeland Security Department to be most at risk for a terrorist attack.  The list begins with New York and five other major metropolitan areas and moves onto smaller cities such as Miami and El Paso.

Larger urban areas simply have more high-value targets and a greater density of potential victims.  Terrorists are also more likely to be drawn to a major U.S. city where an attack would have greater symbolic value and ensure they receive nearly instantaneous coverage from media organizations with an international reach, said John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State University.

Nebraska has received more than $88 million over the last six fiscal years from the Homeland Security Grant Program, which encompasses five major terrorism and disaster preparedness funding initiatives.  That is less than Puerto Rico, though if they believe the amount of funding the state has received is insufficient for its protection, officials here are not prepared to say so publicly.

All told the Homeland Security program has provided more than $365 million to Nebraska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming — middle American states with small populations and no urban areas at the top of the threat scale.

Congress and the Bush administration have been faulted repeatedly for spreading funding around rather than focusing on securing the locations most likely to suffer an attack.   “By crafting legislative grant formulas that guarantee every state and city some federal dole for homeland security, Congress ensures that it spends a little on everything and does nothing well.  This approach might be acceptable for some federal grant programs, but it is not acceptable in matters of national security,” the conservative Heritage Foundation said in a May 2007 report.

Nebraska Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy, who leads the state’s homeland security efforts, said there is both necessity and value in the funding.  The state needs money to meet federal mandates for preparedness and response, while local agencies that receive the bulk of grant funding are expected to follow the state focus of preparing for “all hazards,” whether they result from nature, accidents or terrorism.

Finally, Sheehy and other officials argue that any view of Nebraska as completely off the radar when it comes to terrorism is misleading.

“I don’t think we can let our guard down on our backside,” Sheehy said.  “We don’t where or when the next attack will occur.”

Authorities in Nebraska point to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to illustrate that the Midwest has and could be again a target for terrorism.  Nebraska was also one of five states in which Luke Helder in 2002 is believed to have deposited pipe bombs in an attempt to create a “smiley face” of explosions across middle of the United States.

“There’s areas here in the state of Nebraska that we are concerned about and try to keep good track of and make sure we’re securing,” said Kneifl, the National Guard team commander.  “The antiterrorism folks talk about the fact that the terrorists try to find the softer targets to go to.  If they find a hard target then they’ll divert and go somewhere that’s softer.  That’s not to say that any of the rural areas are really softer targets.”

An attack here is generally considered more likely to come from a U.S.-born hate group or other extremist organization, though officials are not willing to dismiss a foreign threat.  “There are extremists with all kinds of issues with the federal government,” said Col. Bryan Tuma, head of the Nebraska State Patrol.  The type of weapon they employ would depend on their resources and capabilities. 

Tuma noted, one day after a teenager killed eight shoppers at an Omaha mall this month, that it would not take a sophisticated weapon to have a devastating impact.

Acts of sabotage in Nebraska could have statewide, nationwide or even international repercussions, officials said.  Some vulnerabilities mirror those found around the nation while others are linked more closely to the characteristics of the state.

Nebraska houses two nuclear reactors and other critical infrastructure, along with sites that draw large gatherings of people to one place.  More than 80,000 fans can fill Memorial Stadium in Lincoln for a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game.  “When the stadium’s full it’s the third-largest community in Nebraska,” Tuma said.

The state is a leading agricultural producer, making it a frontrunner for contamination of livestock or crops that could prove economically disastrous should widespread eradications become necessary.  Nebraska last year had the second-highest cattle count in the nation, with more than 6.6 million heads, and was sixth in the nation in the number of farm hogs and pigs, with 3 million.  It produced nearly 1.2 billion bushels of corn in 2006, the third-highest national total, also raising the fifth-highest U.S. yield of soybeans and the sixth-highest crops of alfalfa hay and winter wheat.

One cow carrying foot-and-mouth disease could infect others if brought to auction, state officials said.  The damage could spread from there.  Cattle sold at auction “will go out to 10, 15 different states and maybe a couple of foreign countries.  Something introduced at one of those cattle auctions or sales barns could become a nationwide threat,” said Cindy Newsham, response and recovery director for the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency.

“Agriculture is the No. 1 industry in Nebraska,” said Tom Jensen, emergency coordinator for the Nebraska Agriculture Department.  “There’s no question that a wide-scale incident would be very damaging economically.”

Jensen noted that certain “zoonotic” agents such as plague or anthrax could spread from animals to humans, which would make an act of agroterrorism more than an economic strike. 

The psychological effects could stretch across the nation as Americans found they could no longer trust the food supply and that terrorists had crossed a new barrier in the types of attacks they are capable of carrying out, Penn State’s Horgan said.  He said, though, that the resources and technical expertise needed to carry out a systemic infection of crops or livestock are beyond the abilities of most terrorists.  “Realistically, terrorist groups don’t know this kind of thing.”

Materials used in agriculture, found in large amounts across the state, provide an opportunity for terrorists as well.  Ammonium nitrate is a common fertilizer that can be used to produce explosives — as seen in the Oklahoma City bombing. 

Chemicals stored at various locations around Nebraska could be a target or an asset for terrorists, according to state officials.  Interstate 80 and major railways used to move goods and hazardous materials through Nebraska might also be hit, they said.

Sheehy said he believes terrorists will eventually use improvised explosive devices or even radiological “dirty bombs” within the United States.  Attacks involving those weapons, in even the most out of the way location, would have exactly the nationwide demoralizing effect terrorists are looking for, Sheehy added.

Nebraska’s limited population relative to its large size creates a situation in which crucial emergency response and medical resources needed in the aftermath of a disaster might not be immediately available.

“Where a rural area might have one hospital in driving distance of any incident, a major urban area would have multiple hospitals within driving distance to treat more victims,” said the RAND Corp.’s Jackson.

“The challenges that we face here in the more rural areas is that a lot of our political subdivisions are a lot farther away,” the National Guard’s Kneifl said.  “In the event of a crisis we have to work a little harder to get to places because of the large distances that separate us.”

Geography is not the only barrier to a rapid and comprehensive response to an incident, officials said.  Not all fire departments have the training or equipment to manage a hazardous materials event and many, including Scottsbluff, are at least partly staffed by volunteers with jobs and responsibilities fully separate from their emergency duties.

Nebraska’s preparations for a potential act of terrorism in some fashions are not dissimilar to those found in any state — identifying and securing potential targets; purchasing equipment, from night-vision goggles for nuclear reactor security personnel to communications technology enabling different agencies to maintain contact during an emergency; conducting local and statewide planning and training exercises — while emphasizing cooperation to meet the challenges connected directly to its size and dispersed population.

“We realize because of our large geographical area, our low population density, our volunteer networks and our limited resources we had to work together, we had to cooperate and pull together all the available resources,” Tuma said.  “And I think we’ve done that, by and large.”

For instance:

—The state signed memorandums of understanding with 10 municipalities that have full-time firefighters who have received technician-level certification.  In return for a slice of federal funding for training and equipment those departments agreed to respond if called to a crisis in another community with lesser capabilities.  The 72nd CST also has reciprocal agreements with teams in neighboring states to respond to an incident if they are closer.

—The FBI office in Omaha leads a Joint Terrorism Task Force covering Iowa and Nebraska and including law enforcement personnel from both states.  Among other initiatives, task force members maintain contacts with citizens and representatives of the private sector that could be targets — chemical, energy, agriculture — to encourage them to contact authorities if they identify suspicious activity.

With fewer than 100 agents conducting investigations across two states, the office relies on those contacts for word on possible threats, said supervising Special Agent Jim Ammons.

“The people we’re surrounded by are very willing to call us up and say, hey I have a question here or I’m seeing activity over here,” he said.

The office receives between 20 and 25 calls per month regarding suspicious packages or questionable activity.  Some have warranted further investigation but none ultimately led authorities to terrorists.

— The Nebraska Agriculture Department provided educational programs to officials and agricultural producers in all 93 of the state’s counties, Jensen said.  The programs included vulnerability assessments for acts of agroterrorism.  The state’s emergency operations plan has also been updated to include preparations for such an incident.

“Our part would be to make sure we are integrated well with other state agencies, local governments and the national government, with regards to either an animal incident, a food incident, an air incident, a plant crop incident, really making sure our plan is an all-hazards plan,” Jensen said.

The job of the National Guard Civil Support Team is entirely collaborative — to be there when a civilian emergency agency finds its resources outstripped by an event.  The team of 18 soldiers and four airmen, certified for operations in February 2006, offers expertise in communications, medicine, materials analysis, hot-zone survey and other operations.

The team’s primary role is to assist and advise local authorities trying to manage a disaster, and it has the know-how and technology to take on a number of tasks — whether that means ensuring communications between different agencies are maintained in even the most remote locations, identifying the type of biological or chemical contamination or charting the movement of a plume of radioactive material.

“We’re the ones that should be called if there’s an unknown hazard out there,” Kneifl said.

Team members arrived in Scottsbluff in a set of dark blue vehicles packed with equipment and technology.  The day before the exercise, they spent more than an hour in the mall parking lot displaying their capabilities for the firefighters with whom they would be working.

The exercise was the first time that city personnel had hands-on experience working with the team, which could prove important if the two agencies must come together during an actual crisis, Shoemaker said.  The department is scheduled in early 2008 to participate with other local agencies in another exercise with the 72nd and its counterpart from Wyoming.

The two-day trip to Scottsbluff was one part of a continuous training regimen for team members involving personal instruction and cooperative drills with other Civil Support Teams.  The National Guard team tries to conduct at least one exercise per month with civilian first-responder agencies, said the CST’s Rathe.  These drills offer local departments an opportunity to see its strengths and limitations.  They also provide a more realistic view of an actual response. 

“To think that we’re going to go in and just do it on our own without any civilian first responders there, you’d just be whittling yourself into a box,” he said.

Nebraska officials acknowledge that the only true test of preparedness would be an actual act of terrorism, and that it is impossible to safeguard every person or structure at all times.

They know that there could be problems ahead for the security program, particularly when it comes to money.  After an initial burst of homeland security funding in the wake of Sept. 11, many states have seen grant levels drop drastically in the last couple years.  That leaves Nebraska authorities pondering how they will maintain equipment bought with federal money and how they will continue to meet mandates the federal government is no longer willing to pay for.

Despite challenges and uncertainty, leaders in the state said they are ready to respond to an act of terrorism should it occur.  As proof, the lieutenant governor pointed to a report this week that listed Nebraska among the states best prepared for an act of biological terrorism (see GSN, Dec. 19).

“When you think of Nebraska and the Midwest you think maybe we’re not so ready, but I believe we’re a lot more ready than a lot of states are for something to happen,” said Capt. Mary Mangels, medical operations officer for the National Guard team.

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