Terror's Next Target?
More than five years after 9/11, a frightening inside look at why we are still terribly vulnerable
Because of the nature of our just-in-time society, which lacks essential redundancies and backups of crucial supplies, an attack on one of our major ports could be devastating. Most of America's major cities have been built around water for a straightforward reason: Ports are our economic lifelines, with 90 percent of our imports and exports moving by sea. Californians, for instance, depend on the daily importation of petroleum to keep millions of vehicles on the road, and at any given moment there is only a week to 10 days of refined gasoline available in cars, at filling stations, in trucks servicing gas stations, and in storage at refineries. The Port of Long Beach, a sprawling complex just south of Los Angeles, is the West Coast's most important source for crude oil shipments, having received more than 30 million metric tons of petroleum products in 2005. Despite this, in the past five years Los Angeles has received just $25 million in federal grants to improve port security, less than what the feds spend on airport security every two days.
Making them even more attractive targets, ports also play host to some of our nation's most critical and potentially hazardous facilities. Some of the world's largest ships, such as the liquefied petroleum gas tankers that regularly dock in the Los Angeles Harbor, would be virtual powder kegs should they be attacked by a small boat armed with the kind of improvised explosive devices in common use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another tempting target: the liquefied natural gas terminal that sits within 2 miles of the gold-leaf-covered dome of the Massachusetts State House. Once a week a ship more than three football fields long carrying more than 3 billion cubic feet of LNG unloads at the French-owned Distrigas terminal on the Mystic River. To get there, this flammable cargo load travels over three tunnels and under a major bridge and passes within a mile of the homes and workplaces of approximately 100,000 people and Logan International Airport. Terrorists in small boats packed with explosives could penetrate the U.S. Coast Guard's half-mile no-boating buffer zone around the LNG tanker and blow holes through its side as it transits through Boston Harbor. The subsequent fire would incinerate everything within a 700-yard radius on the Charlestown, East Boston, and Chelsea waterfronts. There would be thousands of casualties.
So where do we go from here? Americans need to make building resiliency from within as important a national enterprise as confronting dangers from without. The first step is drastically increasing investment in the infrastructure that supports our daily lives. Although we are seemingly oblivious to the decay that is around us, China has stepped out in the opposite direction. According to the investment firm Morgan Stanley, China invested an estimated $200 billion, or 9 percent of the country's gross domestic product, in infrastructure in 2005. The United States, on the other hand, spent about $110 billion-one tenth of 1 percent of GDP-on infrastructure that same year. Tired of frequent blackouts, China has set up the world's largest electrical grid, more than doubling its electrical generation capacity from its 1995 level. It also built a magnetic levitation train outside Shanghai in 2003 that can travel at more than 300 miles per hour, while our own rail system is literally falling apart.
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