Terror's Next Target?
More than five years after 9/11, a frightening inside look at why we are still terribly vulnerable
Increasingly, Americans are living on the edge of disaster. Like reckless teenagers, we have been embracing risks while shrugging off the likely consequences. We allow chemical facilities and oil refineries to operate right next to crowded neighborhoods without requiring the industry to use safer chemicals. We build homes on floodplains while neglecting to maintain nearby levees. We demand more electricity for air conditioners and computers while allowing the electrical grid to deteriorate. Our already strained first responders have little to no surge capacity to handle large-scale events.
This is madness. There are things we can and must be doing, right now, to make America a more resilient society. It's crucial we focus on strengthening our protections against predictable hurricanes, flooding in the Mississippi Valley, and earthquakes destined to occur in California's major cities. Terrorist acts, meanwhile, will never be eradicated, because they remain the most effective way for the weak to challenge the strong, but we've hardly focused on making ourselves less vulnerable by reducing the threat posed by our most attractive and destructive targets. Managing the risk associated with predictable large-scale natural and man-made disasters, unfortunately, remains far from the top of our national priorities.
Homeland security has become a decidedly second-rate priority today in a world where the United States has chosen to combat terrorism as essentially a military and intelligence activity. In 2006, the defense budget accounted for more than half the federal government's discretionary spending and included $16.5 billion the Pentagon requested specifically to protect itself from terrorist attacks. That means the Department of Defense is spending 10 times more protecting its own military bases, naval ships, and barracks-two thirds of which are located inside the United States-than the federal government is spending on our major cities. The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, is bankrolling a Coast Guard force to protect its vessels moving in and out of Puget Sound in Washington that is several times larger than the entire Seattle port police force, which is responsible for protecting that city's long and densely populated waterfront. Any objective analysis would conclude that terrorists would be more interested in targeting crucial civilian structures on U.S. soil than taking on the U.S. military.
Similarly misplaced priorities have allowed infrastructure like levees and power plants to crumble, putting our country more at risk for catastrophic, Hurricane Katrina-like failures. In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers assigned grades to 15 categories of infrastructure based on hundreds of studies. With four C's, 10 D's, and one incomplete, it reads like a survey that could have been conducted on the eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Roads, dams, water purification facilities, the power grid, and wastewater systems have gone from very bad to worse in the past four years. More than 3,500 dams around the country are unsafe, and many pose a direct risk to human life should they fail. And nearly half of the country's 257 river locks, powerful gates that allow ships and barges to travel rivers that rapidly change elevation, are functionally obsolete, a number projected to rise to 80 percent by 2020. The U.S. power system is in urgent need of modernization spending, yet maintenance spending has dropped each year since 1992. Last July, a power outage in Queens, N.Y., left 100,000 people without power in sweltering heat for a week.
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