Global Security Newswire

U.S. Homeland Security Department officials Friday unveiled their new $60 million Project “Biowatch” air-monitoring system, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Oct. 22).

Biowatch includes almost 500 air-monitoring stations covering 31 U.S. cities and half the nation’s population, according to AP. The system has yet to raise a false alarm, said Parney Albright, an assistant secretary for Homeland Security (see GSN, Oct. 10).

Although Homeland Security officials did not name the cities that are covered by Biowatch, local authorities have said that Washington, New York, Chicago, Houston, Boston, San Francisco and San Diego are included (Ted Bridis, Associated Press/Miami Herald, Nov. 15).

Technicians collect air samples at least once a day from the monitoring stations and bring them to laboratories for analysis. The program costs about $2 million per city, much of which is spent on labor, according to Albright (Deborah Charles, Reuters, Nov. 14).

Some critics have said Biowatch cannot detect small releases, is useless against indoor attacks and allows too much lag time between an attack and the sample analysis (see GSN, July 11).

“Unless it’s a major atmospheric release of large quantities of material, I do not think it would be hard at all for Biowatch to miss an attack,” said Calvin Chue, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

Albright acknowledged the system’s shortcomings, but said it could still help minimize casualties from an attack.

“It won’t save everyone,” Albright said. “By the time we get the hit confirmed, the people who are going to be contaminated have already been contaminated,” he added (Bridis, Associated Press/Miami Herald).