County more secure in aftermath of 9/11

Release date: 9/10/2011

Sunday News
By Gil Smart,Editor
Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the deadliest days in American history.
But in a roundabout way, the events of that terrible day might have saved lives in Lancaster County during the terrible, rain-soaked days of last week.

As floods ravaged this part of Pennsylvania, emergency management officials with the South Central Task Force huddled at the Lancaster County Public Safety Center, coordinating the response across an eight-county region.

The task force — formally the South Central PA Counter Terrorism Task Force — is an emergency response coalition funded largely by the federal Department of Homeland Security, created in the wake of 9/11. The public safety center itself was built, in part, in response to the terrorist attacks.

"All the people who worked together worked together because 9/11 happened," said Duane Hagelgans, public information officer for the task force and commissioner of Blue Rock Fire Rescue. Emergency response times were likely shortened, resources allocated more efficiently.

"It wouldn't have happened, or been as well coordinated, without 9/11," Hagelgans said.

While experts talk about the economic, emotional and international impact of the terrorist attacks, the enduring legacy of 9/11 here may be what might be called "hometown security."

Ten years ago, an infrastructure to handle large-scale disasters didn't exist. Now it does. Government, businesses and individuals beefed up security in the wake of the attacks. Hospitals are better prepared for events such as the anthrax attacks that happened in the weeks after 9/11. Schools and colleges that had already boosted security in the wake of shootings like Columbine implemented even tighter measures.

We're more secure. We're better prepared. It's cost tens of millions of dollars.

None of which could prevent the flooding last week. But in terms of responding to it, Hagelgans said, "we're light years ahead of where we were 10 years ago."

Educator's view

Mike Leichliter was principal of Manor Middle School in the Penn Manor School District when the planes hit the Twin Towers. He remembers the fear and the uncertainty of that day — for example, officials at one district school decided not to let kids out onto the playground. "In retrospect, that was probably silly," said Leichliter, now Penn Manor's superintendent.

What wasn't silly were the parents jamming the district's phone lines, saying they wanted to take their children out of school immediately. "We had plans in place at our [district's] southern end schools if there was a problem at Peach Bottom [atomic power station] and we needed to evacuate," he said. But the district had never had so many parents demanding to take their kids out of school, and no procedure for handling mass pickups. As a result, the district crafted one.

"Even Pearl Harbor didn't cause this type of alarm," Leichliter said. "But [9/11] was a strike at civilians. ... It was the first time people thought [terrorists] could hit us here in Lancaster County."

That fear led officials at Millersville University to devise a way to evacuate the college in the event of an attack on Three Mile Island or another major disaster, and a blueprint for evacuating Biemesderfer Stadium, said Pat Weidinger, university director of environmental health and safety.

"We actually organized and conducted a mock emergency evacuation of the stadium," said Weidinger in an email. "We still have a basic procedure to do so today as a result."

Millersville also tightened security on its public water system, installed a siren warning system, and began working with Millersville Borough and Penn Manor School District officials realizing that "any terrorist incident [like 9/11] would impact all of us if it were to happen in Millersville," Weidinger said. Officials still meet monthly, gaming "what-if" scenarios.

Hospitals allied

Lancaster General Health implemented a raft of changes after 9/11, intended to boost both its security and its ability to respond to disasters. It's able now to work with 16 hospitals in an eight-county region to standardize training, evacuation plans, mass casualty plans and mass immunizations, said Marion McGowan, president of Lancaster General Hospital and executive vice president of the Lancaster General Health system. It has the ability to function if it can't access supplies due to a disruption. It has plans to implement a "military-based management system" in response to a natural disaster or other catastrophe, and continues to conduct training and drills.

And in the wake of the anthrax attacks that happened after 9/11, it purchased decontamination tents and "isolation facilities."

McGowan said much of this would still be in place had the attacks never occurred. "Whether there are terrorist events or not, there are natural disasters ... we would be doing this nonetheless."

Got our attention

Still, said Patrick Egan, owner of Select Security and several related firms, "9/11 got everyone's attention about how vulnerable we were. People began to look around and ask, how vulnerable is our building, our people, our executives?"

When the answer was "too vulnerable," many called Egan's firm, and business boomed.

Prior to 9/11, said Egan, card access systems (whereby employees must swipe a pass card to gain entrance) were relatively rare. Since then, they've proliferated. So has video surveillance, as more firms, schools and government agencies installed cameras.

"We did water plants, we did a lot of schools," Egan said. "One of our largest customers is a food processing plant. We've done a lot of chemical plants. We're selling more residential systems."

Ever since 9/11, "there's really been a broad appeal for more security — where [a client] had a little."

That's true at Lancaster's Conestoga River water plant, said Charlotte Katzenmoyer, city public works director.

"The gates are fully automated and equipped with CCTV [closed circuit television]," she wrote in an email. No one enters the plant without a code or an operator asking for identification and the reason for visiting.

"Alarms and CCTV have been added at other critical facilities/assets within the system in addition to the plants and were part of the vulnerability assessment we conducted after 9/11," she said.

The improvements were part of the $80 million filtration project completed by the city in 2009. That money came from federal grants and water customers, among other sources.

But many of the improvements in local safety and security since 9/11 were funded by the federal government. Local fire companies, EMS units and other first responders have received millions in federal grants; funding was boosted significantly after 9/11.

The Department of Homeland Security has funneled some $32 million to Lancaster County over the past decade, said Hagelgans, of the South Central Task Force. The money has gone to pay for a number of services and assets, now at local officials' disposal. According to newspaper files, the Department of Homeland Security gave grants for:

*The Lenco BearCat, a military-style vehicle which, according to news reports, can "knock down a wall, pull down a fence, withstand small-arms fire and deliver a dozen heavily armed police officers to a tense emergency scene," was purchased with a $226,224 grant.

*Millersville University Police Department got $15,000 toward a system called dTective, a video-, image- and audio-clarification system designed to analyze recorded evidence.

*A grant paid for a $150,000 siren warning system at Millersville University.

Homeland Security has contributed $1 million toward the eventual purchase and installation of 256 mobile radios and "mini-repeaters" for 80 county fire companies and hazardous materials teams.

Most recently, Homeland Security funds from the eight-county region served by the South Central Task Force (Adams, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon, Perry and York counties) received grants to pay for "South Central Alert," a system that will provide emergency alerts via telephone and other communication devices.

The county's Public Safety Training Center was not build with Homeland Security funding. But upon breaking ground for the facility in 2002, officials acknowledged that 9/11 helped move the project forward; then-state Sen. Noah Wenger vowed that "these dead" — those killed in the terrorist attacks — "shall not have died in vain."

The South Central Task Force designated the site as its "Multi-Agency Coordination Center" — meaning that in the event of a regional disaster like last week's flooding, the training center would serve as command center for a coordinated response. At the time, Lancaster County Emergency Management Director Randy Gockley announced nearly $200,000 in communications upgrades to be paid for by the terrorism task force, which is funded by Homeland Security.

And the task force continues to run training exercises to prepare emergency responders for whatever might come their way.

While the focus of the task force was initially terrorism, that's shifted — as reflected in the fact that it dropped "terrorism" from its name in 2007. Ultimately, 9/11 helped communities like Lancaster County be better prepared for natural disasters; as noted in a Newsweek article last week, federal officials think the most devastating events in the coming years will be the terrorist called "Mother Nature."

"Around 2004 our training shifted," Hagelgans said. Responding to fires, tornadoes and floods was now on the agenda. It paid off last week.

"In emergency services, it's almost impossible for there to be a seamless response," he said. But now, "we can all be working off the same sheet of music."