They hated America and wanted to make a point by
killing Americans. Too bad they got hungry, because, had police reacted in
time, one of the hostages might still be alive.
Illinois State Police Capt. Rob Haley struggled to
explain the tragedy:
“On the delivery of some of their demands,
which turned out to be food, communications broke down, they didn’t
get their way, and they executed a hostage.”
Another captive, who secretly contacted police, was
tossed from a roof by the terrorists.
The toll: two hostages killed, a police officer
fatally wounded, and a bomb detonated in a school.
That’s how part of the war on terror played out
in Springfield last
week.
Fortunately, it was only a drill.
For five days last week, the capital city was the
scene of a major anti-terrorism disaster-training exercise that involved
more than 850 participants from nearly 40 agencies. The drill — which
included bomb threats, chemical- and biological-weapons training,
shootouts, and hostage negotiations — was designed to test and
prepare local law-enforcement officials for events that have no precedent
in this city of 113,000 people.
Springfield is no London or New York City, but local
officials insist that that’s no reason not to be vigilant.
After all, Springfield is the seat of government for
the nation’s fifth most populous state, sits a stone’s throw
from more nuclear reactors than any other city in the United States, and is
the internationally recognized home of an American icon.
And, as the bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City proved, terrorism doesn’t just
happen in large cities.
Understandably, nobody wants an attack on his watch,
which might explain the thinking for last week’s supersophisticated
scavenger hunt that at times played out like an amalgam of the Die Hard movies.
Last week’s drill cost an estimated $800,000,
according to City Hall spokesman Ernie Slottag, including overtime pay for
the participants and the cost to build various sets, such as a
“chemical lab” on the ninth floor of the Major Byrd Hi-Rise.
That’s a lot of dough for a city the size of
Springfield.
Back in March, City Council members battled over
whether to fund the city’s Office of Homeland Security at all, and
the budget passed only after Mayor Tim Davlin broke a 5-5 tie.
Ward 1 Ald. Frank Edwards led the fight against
funding. The discouraging thing, Edwards says, is that anti-terrorism
efforts are new, open-ended ways for cities and other groups to get their
hands on taxpayers’ money.
“If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard
it twice on City Council: ‘Hey, we can get that [paid] through [the
U.S. Department of] Homeland Security . . . ’ Well, that’s our money, guys. And I
understand the thing that if we don’t get it, some other city will
— but people need to understand, those are our tax dollars and
that’s the new trick word right now, ‘homeland security.’
”
Ward 3 Ald. Frank Kunz says that he has no problem
with the drill as long as state, not city, money was used to fund it.
However, he adds:
“I’m not real concerned [about terrorism
in Springfield] — never was. I doubt if Osama bin Laden, or anyone
else, is sitting in their cave saying, ‘Let’s kick the s*** of
Springfield.”
Let’s say that
Kunz is wrong and terrorists do strike Springfield.
What would they hit? The Capitol is an obvious
target. Though the city of Springfield would provide some support, as would
the Illinois State Police and other agencies, depending on the nature of
the threat, the Secretary of State Police or Federal Bureau of
Investigation (which has primary jurisdiction over all terrorism matters)
would be in charge.
The Paul Findley Federal Building? The Springfield
police and fire departments would respond to the scene, but the FBI would
call the shots.
Though an attack on the City, Water, Light &
Power plant could be devastating and is probably more plausible, can the
city of Springfield keep us safe from international terrorism?
“There’s a feeling that many people have
that this is a federal responsibility or a state responsibility, and
they’re partly right, of course,” says John Allen Williams, an
expert in civil-military relations at Loyola University Chicago,
“because there are aspects of this that can only be done at that
level. But the first responders — wherever this is, whether
it’s Springfield, Ill., or Springfield, Mass., or anywhere else
— are going to be local, and so they need to be highly trained in
what kinds of threats they face and how to deal with them.
“Police in Springfield don’t need to know
where Osama bin Laden is, and they don’t need to know all the
intelligence information,” Williams adds. “What they do need to
know is whether there is an increased likelihood of some kind of attack and
what is known about its nature and timing.”
Training for terrorist attacks really isn’t
different than training for large-scale disasters, Williams adds.
“A chemical attack can look very much like a
rail car exploding, another kind of thing local responders have to be able
to deal with. These kinds of attacks aren’t so much different from
the kinds of things local responders have to be prepared for all the
time.”
Springfield’s anti-terrorism efforts
aren’t new. In October 2001, then-Mayor Karen Hasara appointed
assistant chief of police Jim Cimarossa to coordinate the city’s
hometown security planning.
Cimarossa, along with then-Fire Chief Frank Edwards
and public-health director Ray Cooke, traveled to Washington, D.C., for a
conference dealing
with some of the issues that arose in the aftermath of 9/11.
When they returned from the trip, Cimarossa began
putting together Springfield’s first emergency-operations plan, which
involved infrastructure security — city agencies doing their parts to
develop plans to prevent and respond to terrorist attack. Cimarossa says
that he then arranged some citywide training with postal inspectors during
the anthrax scare of 2001 and developed some new city policies — all
without spending an extra dime.
After Tim Davlin succeeded Hasara as mayor in 2003,
Cimarossa was asked to step down; assistant police chief Ralph Caldwell was
eventually tapped as part-time director of homeland security.
As assistant chief, Caldwell reports to Chief Don
Kliment; as director of homeland security, he reports directly to Davlin.
Creating a single emergency-operations plan was one
of Caldwell’s top priorities when he took over.
“We got together as a citywide approach on
rewriting our emergency-operations plan. We had an old plan that we dusted
off; it was outdated. So I go and get that copy, and then I find out we had
a couple of people working out of Chief Cimarossa’s office and
they’re working on a terrorism annex plan — and now I’ve
got three plans.
“I put them on a table. I’m flipping
through them. They contradict each other, and I’m, like, ‘No,
this isn’t gonna work. We need one plan for the city of
Springfield.’ ”
Two weeks ago, the city released its new
emergency-operations plan, which Caldwell says was eight months in the
making, to key city officials and aldermen.
“We’re now trying to train the entire
city on it. In the police department, we’ve trained each one of our
sworn officers on it, and each city director was advised that they have to
train their employees.
“In the past, it would be one entity, like, the
police department coming up with a citywide approach. This is the first
time we got every department to work together on a citywide approach
because things are bigger and better than they were when I first joined the
police department with the 9/11 attacks and the separate attacks in London.
Crime scenes are a lot bigger, and the devastation is a lot more than
we’re used to.”
Cimarossa, now retired and teaching at MacMurray
College, doesn’t have a problem with Caldwell’s having a
budget.
“I don’t want to sound like this is a
crybaby thing, ‘They have it and I didn’t,’ ” he
says, “but I got a pretty good idea what they’re doing now
versus what we were doing back then, and, frankly, no difference.”
He continues: “They’re coordinating,
they’re meeting, they’re doing infrastructure security,
they’re creating plans the city with other city employees and other
city agencies. We did all that.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has spent
close to $10 billion for anti-terrorism efforts since 9/11. Right now,
Congress is considering the latest homeland-security appropriations bill of
around $30 billion in discretionary funding. The DHS then appropriates
funds to states, which in turn divide it among local governments.
As it stands, the formula is population-based, so
Illinois gets more money than 45 other states.
Here, the job of doling out federal homeland-security
dollars belongs to the Illinois Terrorism Task Force, created in 2003 by
Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s executive order.
According to task-force chairman Michael Chamness, 80
percent of the federal funds his department receives must go directly to
municipal governments. In the 2005 federal fiscal year, Illinois got $102
million, with almost half of that earmarked for Chicago and Cook County,
according to their 2004 annual report.
Chamness says that outside Chicago, federal
homeland-security money is fairly evenly distributed across the state in
such areas as Peoria, Rockford, Urbana-Champaign, Springfield,
Bloomington-Normal, and the Quad Cities.
That the state purchased 70,000 gas masks for every
cop and firefighter in Illinois notwithstanding, Illinois is doing a good
job of using the money responsibly; in fact, the Land of Lincoln was
recognized by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University as exemplary in this regard.
“The politically expedient thing to do
would be to give everybody a check,” Chamness says, but that
isn’t how it works. Though Chamness reports to Blagojevich and Carl
Hawkinson, deputy chief of staff for public safety, all homeland-security
funding requests go through Chamness and eventually must be approved by the
governor.
Although the checks and balances are tight, Chamness
admits that it is possible to circumvent them by manipulating the language
in a grant request.
No sooner than the feds had started handing out
homeland-security checks, cities found ways to blow the money — on
Segways (two-wheeled motorized scooters), air-conditioned garbage trucks,
chemical suits, traffic cones, bulletproof vests for dogs.
The Illinois Policy Institute monitors pork-barrel
government spending and recently put out its 2005
Illinois Piglet Book. Though the report
doesn’t address homeland-security waste specifically, Greg
Blankenship, executive director of the Springfield-based institute, says
there’s a fine line between making sure governments have the tools
they need to fight terrorism and simply throwing away money.
“Whenever you’re doing national-security
analysis, you’re looking at two things, capability and intentions;
then you start to prioritize what you have to defend against. Local
government’s responsibility is to mind the store. In that sense,
I’d be a proponent of states’ stepping in to make sure
we’re more secure,” Blankenship says.
“Policy-makers are going to have gauge
threat,” he says, “We have all these al-Qaeda-like
organizations running around, but it’s more likely that somebody will
shoot up Springfield High School.”
That being the case, doesn’t it make sense for
small cities to get, or spend, as much money on protecting themselves as
larger cities do?
“Frankly, no,” says Loyola
Chicago’s Williams.
“It has occurred to every terrorist in America
that they would like to fly a plane into the Sears Tower. They probably
don’t know what the tallest building is in Springfield and
wouldn’t aim for it they did.
“This is one on those things where pork-barrel
politics don’t work well. Now, because under the rubric of terrorism,
people are pushing their own agendas — whether it’s civil
liberties, on one side or the other, or something they want to sell the
government, or some foreign-policy thing. So, yeah, people seize on
whatever’s out there to try to benefit their own
situation.”
To pay for last week’s practice drill, the
city of Springfield will receive grants from the Illinois Emergency
Management Agency. Caldwell says that it will take several more weeks to
get final numbers.
IEMA will reimburse the city for as much as $130,000
worth of overtime costs. Additionally, the Fifth Weapons of Mass
Destruction Civil Support Team gave $95,000 to help build the sets where
the exercises were carried out. The remaining $775,000 is the estimated
cost that outside agencies involved in the drill will incur.
This year Springfield set aside $98,051 for its
homeland-security office. Much of this money went into the
emergency-operations center, of which Caldwell is especially proud, in the
basement of the Springfield Police Department headquarters, on Monroe
Street. The appropriation, which doesn’t include Caldwell’s
$89,894 police salary, pays for a secretary, printing, computers, software,
renovations, filing cabinets, and a tent.
He got permission from Kliment to take up part of the
squad room, knock out a wall, and enlarge the emergency-operations center
to fit some furniture in it.
“What I had to do from there,” Caldwell
says, “I had no computer hook-ups down there, no electrical hook-ups,
so we pretty much had to dig through the concrete with saws. We had to hire
people to come in and do that to actually run wires and conduit.”
Caldwell says he now has hook-ups for 20 to 30 computers. He’s also
been able to buy several computers with a block grant and software to track
the city’s resources, and he’s made some cosmetic improvements
to the center: “I bought new carpet, had the old tile down there that
was peeling up, so I ended up carpeting the entire room. It deadened the
sound in the room, because it [previously] had tile down there and it was like a big echo
chamber.”
Caldwell says he still wishes he had the funding to
do more, and that’s the sort of thing that gets to folks such as
Edwards, the alderman, who notes that the state already has two
emergency-operation centers in Springfield. Agencies, he says, should talk
to each other and say, “‘Look, we got an EOC. Can we borrow it?
Can we share it?’ That’s the way it was, and we’re slowly
moving away from that, where everybody says, ‘We gotta have one of
those.’ ”
But Caldwell says that the state emergency-operations
center is off-limits and, even if there were an extraordinary event, it
would be too small to support all of the personnel who would be needed in
that situation.
It does seem a little strange that this small
Midwestern city has a separate function for anti-terrorism planning. In St. Louis, for example,
those duties are shared by the chief of police and the directors of public
safety and emergency management.
For anybody who thinks that funding for homeland
security is wasted in Springfield, Caldwell notes that $40,000 of his
budget pays for a full-time secretary with benefits, leaving him $60,000 to
protect the city from terrorism. He considers his office an insurance
policy:
“Do you need it? Probably not. Is it nice to
have? Absolutely. It all depends on what level of protection you want.
“I’m hoping we wasted every dime in that
emergency-operations center; I hope we wasted this week of training. I pray
we did. But you know what? If we didn’t, we’re a lot more
prepared to fight these disasters and protect the city.”
Williams, the Loyola professor, endorses that sort of
measured response:
Being prepared doesn’t mean sacrificing other
worthwhile local efforts.
“Resources are limited, so you have to be
sensible,” he says, “and no one can ever be completely
prepared.”
Drill bits
A week that won’t live in infamy
Springfield’s first full-scale disaster drill
cost almost $1 million (the city’s portion, roughly $130,000, will be
covered by grant), involved 857 people, and sure seemed like a lot of fun.
This is how the week played out, more or less:
Day 1 (Monday, July
18). It’s a quiet July morning in Springfield until terrorists from
the fictional Cortina Liberation Front lay siege to the vacant Major Byrd
Hi-Rise on the East Side, capturing two dozen hostages. Officers responding
to the scene are met with “simmunition” (simulated ammunition);
two feign injury.
Cops nab one of the bad hombres, who says
there’s a bomb in a school. Police locate the device in a truck
outside Franklin Middle School and take it apart.
Also in the truck is a box containing what the city
describes as smallpox vaccine. Officers are able to remove the vaccine
without incident. Inside the school, a pipe bomb explodes in the library.
No one is hurt, nor are there any casualties.
Heavy downpours halt the action momentarily for safety
reasons.
According to a press release from City Hall spokesman
Ernie Slottag, at about 1 p.m. a tank “explodes” at the City
Water, Light & Power plant. How many people are hurt is unclear.
“A tally of victims revealed there were 8 casualties and 12 injuries,
5 of them seriously,” the release says.
Day 2 (Tuesday, July 19).
Overnight, a hostage is killed when takeout food doesn’t arrive on
time; another is pushed from the roof for using the phone to call police.
We also learn from police that three hostages have been released.
“Upon interrogation of those released has
revealed the group has claimed responsibility for the explosion yesterday
at CWLP and for planting the bombs at Franklin Middle School,”
officials announce in a press release.
Later, the CFL terrorists release a group of balloons,
presumably in an attempt to identify wind currents and direction of travel.
Police move their mobile-command vehicle to avoid being downwind from Major
Byrd.
When negotiations deadlock, cops decide to storm the
high-rise. One Illinois State Police SWAT member plays dead, as do six of
the terrorists.
Days 3 and 4 (Wednesday
and Thursday, July 20 and 21). The games continue. A meth lab, ostensibly
used to fund international terrorism, is discovered in a home in Pawnee.
Also, a police captain is kidnapped and his hair pulled by a terrorist.
At the Major Byrd Hi-Rise, it’s determined that
anthrax may have been released in balloons earlier in the week. A press
release claims that a media alert was sent instructing anyone who finds a
green balloon to notify authorities. (Illinois
Times never receives the alert.) Four
“die” after being exposed to anthrax.
Day 5 (Friday, July 22).
Mercifully, the drill ends with two news conferences — one real, one
just for practice.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2005.
