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Bioterrorism drills predicted missteps
©New York Times, WASHINGTON -- Terrorism experts warned for years that federal, state and local governments were ill-prepared to handle a biological attack, and elaborate drills found glaring gaps in coordination, communication and command. This month, real life looked frighteningly like the practice runs. As the nation grappled with anthrax, the FBI at first took a letter that turned out to be harmless from NBC News to a New York City Health Department laboratory for testing, and when the letter containing anthrax was finally tested days later, technicians accidentally contaminated a special chamber in the lab, forcing its closing. Officials in Florida told executives at a tabloid newspaper office on a Friday that there was no reason to close shop because a photo editor had died of anthrax, then shut the office down that Sunday after much of the staff had worked there all weekend. And nowhere was confusion worse than at the seat of government on Capitol Hill. When more than two dozen workers were exposed to anthrax from a letter opened in the office of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, House Speaker Dennis Hastert suggested wrongly that people were already "infected" and that spores were in the ventilation system. He sent his members home, while the Senate, which had raised the alarm, closed its offices but met as usual. So far, one person has died and a handful out of thousands tested have been infected and are responding to treatment with antibiotics or are cured. But repeated confusion about coordination, communication, politics, bureaucracy and science amplified on television and the Internet 24 hours a day also exposed many of the basic weaknesses in the nation's sprawling and disparate emergency response system that the experts had warned about. It was just the kind of confusion that drills like Dark Winter, a make-believe smallpox attack staged last summer by several think tanks, had shown might occur. "Today is a horrific reprise," said Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, who played himself in the exercise, in which a million people were "killed," public order collapsed, state and federal officials disagreed over how to handle the situation and put out information, and the National Security Council wound up discussing the need for martial law. Assessing how various levels of government have responded since anthrax killed the tabloid photo editor in Florida on Oct. 5, Keating said, "There was too much contradictory information too soon," instead of "crisp, intelligent, accurate information that is not contradictory and confusing." The anthrax scare pales in comparison to the doomsday situations played out in several previous exercises, which involved contagious diseases and feuds inherent when federal agencies like the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were suddenly forced to take leading roles in coordinating the work of state and local health and law enforcement officials. "We have long known about the problems with communications, or about who's in charge; we shouldn't have been surprised," said Randy Larson, a retired Air Force colonel and director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security, which helped devise Dark Winter. "We've seen in exercise after exercise that we're not as prepared as we need to be," Larson said. "We're really fortunate that this was as small-scale as it was. This wasn't a biological attack. It was a biological incident." Senior government officials say they have learned painful lessons about what and what not to say and do in the future. By Thursday, the White House, realizing it had allowed public confusion to fester, began staging daily briefings with its new chief of domestic security, former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, and top doctors and officials from affected agencies. The missteps began early. Even as Robert Stevens lay dying of anthrax, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, suggested it was an isolated case, perhaps contracted by drinking from a stream, a possibility scientists immediately dismissed as unlikely. Such comments, and the subsequent stinginess of federal law enforcement and health officials in releasing information, fueled rather than calmed public fears. "It started from the very beginning, when they said Mr. Stevens was an isolated event and we thought they were checking sheep in North Carolina," said Rep. Robert Wexler, whose district includes Boca Raton, where Stevens worked for American Media. "The amount of information that has been provided at times has been lacking." Wexler added: "It would just be imprudent not to review the manner in which we responded. I think we'll find a great deal of success, a lot of people's efforts are extraordinary and are to be lauded. But I think we'll also find that there have been some shortcomings." New York City had been preparing for the biological or chemical attack it hoped it would never face since at least 1997, when officials staged an elaborate drill that involved hundreds of city workers, more than 40 hospital emergency rooms and executives from an array of critical industries. But when anthrax began coming in letters to news organizations, both the FBI and city health technicians made serious blunders, and bureaucratic rivalries broke out between New York City officials and the FBI, both sides acknowledged. The FBI did not initially notify the police of a report of a suspicious letter at NBC News and later pressed for more extensive environmental tests than the city wanted at ABC, where the infant son of a news producer was presumed to have been infected, though no contamination was found there. When the FBI was first contacted about a suspicious letter at NBC on Sept. 25, it did not show up until the next day. The officials did not move to test the letter immediately for anthrax spores, and did not follow protocol and alert the city police.
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