NEWS
The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - 9
Nation's largest anti-terror
drill opens in NJ,
$16 million week-long
military exercise aims to
find the weaknesses in the
country's defense planning
HILLSIDE, N.J. (AP) - The biggest
anti-terrorism drill ever held in the Unit-
ed States got under way yesterday with a
mock biological attack in New Jersey and
a simulated chemical-weapons explosion
in Connecticut.
Named TOPOFF 3, the $16 million,
weeklong exercise is meant to find weak
spots in the nation's emergency planning.
"I want to make it clear that we are
going to push our plans and our systems
to the very limit," U.S. Homeland Secu-
rity Secretary Michael Chertoff said. "So
we expect failure because we're actually
going to be seeking to push to failure, and
that is, in our judgment, the best way to
get a 'lessons learned' from what we do
here."
Although no real weapons or bio-agents
are used, state and local officials respond-
ed as if it were the real thing, sending
ambulances to hospitals and flooding the
area with investigators and emergency
workers in haz-mat suits.
"It's a test of how well people are com-
municating with each other and whether
the right people are getting pulled into this
exercise," said Roger Shatzkin, a spokes-
man for New Jersey's Office of Counter-
terrorism.
The biological attack drill started in
New Jersey at the Hillside campus of Kean
University with officers swarming around
the scene of a mock auto wreck.
A hose nozzle sticking out a rear win-
dow of one vehicle raised cautions; they
found a commercial sprayer that presum-
ably had been used to disperse a fake bio-
logical agent.
Officials also rolled in a bomb-squad
robot with a mounted video camera to
allow investigators to peer inside the sus-
picious vehicle from a safe distance.
Reporters were given a simulated brief-
ing and told the vehicles did not match
their registrations.
Doctors tried to connect the incident
to a patient who had been admitted to a
hospital with "flu-like symptoms." More
"victims" of the supposed biological
attack headed to emergency rooms, and
Con
state health officials started zeroing in on
pneumonic plague as the likely cause.
In Connecticut, federal officials staged
a mock chemical weapons explosion on
the New London waterfront. Buses were
overturned to create a realistic scene, and
volunteers played victims of the attack.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell went into
a conference call with Chertoff, declared
a state of emergency and raised the state's
threat level. Representatives from all state
agencies worked the phones as a virtual
news broadcast kept officials updated.
In the federal command center in sub-
urban Virginia, more than 100 officials
hunched over laptops and picked up blink-
ing phones as the test attacks began.
All told, more than 10,000 people will
participate in the drill, including exercises
that will involve officials in Canada and
England. More than 8,500 people took part
in similar exercises in Seattle and Chicago
in 2003.
Today and tomorrow, the drill will shift
to hospitals, where hundreds of mock
patients will show up in various degrees
of medical crisis. Some will be treated
in emergency rooms, while others might
undergo outdoor decontamination.
A bomb squad suiting up for a mock disaster drill, at the Kean University parking lot in Hillside, Union
County, NJyesterday
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