Get your own POD, this one's mine!
April 23, 2005 6:06 PM Subscribe
On April 4, New Jersey and Connecticut were attacked by terrorists. Nearly 6,000 people were killed. mathowie has the video. (85 MB via bittorrent) [MI]
Oh no! Not New Jersey! The only ones that would suffer are stockholders for hairspray, bubblegum companies and Lee Press-On Nails.
posted by Arch Stanton at 6:40 PM on April 23, 2005
posted by Arch Stanton at 6:40 PM on April 23, 2005
It also nicely shows how easily TV can report or REPORT.
posted by elpapacito at 6:41 PM on April 23, 2005
posted by elpapacito at 6:41 PM on April 23, 2005
What is easy download? Just a way to get people to download bloatware?
posted by Dean Keaton at 6:51 PM on April 23, 2005
posted by Dean Keaton at 6:51 PM on April 23, 2005
According to the news reports, it went off without a hitch. Which means it was useless as an exercise and only served to reinforce complacency and inertia.
Kinda like the war games the Germans used to have where the Kaiser always got to win.
Oh, by the way, has the FBI caught the anthrax attacker yet? Sorry for asking....
Sleep tight tonight, we're winning the Global War on Terror (tm).
posted by warbaby at 6:54 PM on April 23, 2005
Kinda like the war games the Germans used to have where the Kaiser always got to win.
Oh, by the way, has the FBI caught the anthrax attacker yet? Sorry for asking....
Sleep tight tonight, we're winning the Global War on Terror (tm).
posted by warbaby at 6:54 PM on April 23, 2005
What is the point of having a fake news report about this? I mean, it's interesting and all, but who's paying these actors, and why is that part of the exercise?
fear, baby, FEAR!
posted by quonsar at 7:15 PM on April 23, 2005
fear, baby, FEAR!
posted by quonsar at 7:15 PM on April 23, 2005
Probably because if something like that happened one of the major issues the responders would have to deal with is keeping people informed and the word's press corps trying to get involved, get information, and also get in the way.
posted by obfusciatrist at 7:26 PM on April 23, 2005
posted by obfusciatrist at 7:26 PM on April 23, 2005
Man, if you strip that "This is a drill" thing off the bottom, this looks pretty damned real.
I don't really think the simulation is very accurate, however: only one news channel showed up to cover the disaster.
posted by graventy at 7:32 PM on April 23, 2005
I don't really think the simulation is very accurate, however: only one news channel showed up to cover the disaster.
posted by graventy at 7:32 PM on April 23, 2005
Just what we need to scare the public into spending more on the defense budget.
posted by Demogorgon at 8:22 PM on April 23, 2005
posted by Demogorgon at 8:22 PM on April 23, 2005
Despite all the criticism of security "simulations" like this, they're really valuable, as they would be in any large endeavor that coordinates a lot of different people and groups. As alluded to in the name, they've run several of these before, and each time found bottlenecks in communications and response that DHS and other agencies were able to address. This time will be no different, though I suspect that the efficiency with which this one occurred is due in part to the earlier exercises and will still result in areas to improve.
There's lots of things to criticize about the carrying out of the GWOT and scaremongering, but planning and simulating responses to possible attacks is fairly responsible. Or do you really believe that it's impossible for future attacks to occur and preparation for them is a big waste of time and money?
posted by elvolio at 9:16 PM on April 23, 2005
There's lots of things to criticize about the carrying out of the GWOT and scaremongering, but planning and simulating responses to possible attacks is fairly responsible. Or do you really believe that it's impossible for future attacks to occur and preparation for them is a big waste of time and money?
posted by elvolio at 9:16 PM on April 23, 2005
From Slate:
"Journalists who participate in a TOPOFF event get paid for their troubles. For each terrorism drill, the federal government hires professional freelance journalists to play the role of "journalists." They start training three weeks before the exercise begins and are encouraged to grill government sources for information on the mock crisis. During the exercise, they report on the attacks for a fake closed-circuit news network. This year, a PR firm hired six reporters for the drill using advertisements on JournalismJobs.com. Role-playing reporters must not be full-time employees of a real news organization, and they must agree never to write about the mock terror attack in any other context."
posted by falconred at 9:18 PM on April 23, 2005
"Journalists who participate in a TOPOFF event get paid for their troubles. For each terrorism drill, the federal government hires professional freelance journalists to play the role of "journalists." They start training three weeks before the exercise begins and are encouraged to grill government sources for information on the mock crisis. During the exercise, they report on the attacks for a fake closed-circuit news network. This year, a PR firm hired six reporters for the drill using advertisements on JournalismJobs.com. Role-playing reporters must not be full-time employees of a real news organization, and they must agree never to write about the mock terror attack in any other context."
posted by falconred at 9:18 PM on April 23, 2005
I thought these drills were pretty lame too, but after reading about the war games stuff in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, they do have a purpose.
I don't doubt that this TOPOFF3 exercise helped first responders and hospitals practice, but the TV aspect of it seemed extraneous. After reading all about it, I still don't see why they did the fake news report.
posted by mathowie at 10:51 PM on April 23, 2005
I don't doubt that this TOPOFF3 exercise helped first responders and hospitals practice, but the TV aspect of it seemed extraneous. After reading all about it, I still don't see why they did the fake news report.
posted by mathowie at 10:51 PM on April 23, 2005
After reading all about it, I still don't see why they did the fake news report.
My guess (as a jmc grad) is that they want to train the government people on how to deal with reporters in this sort of situation.
posted by drezdn at 11:29 PM on April 23, 2005
My guess (as a jmc grad) is that they want to train the government people on how to deal with reporters in this sort of situation.
posted by drezdn at 11:29 PM on April 23, 2005
The fake news reports are training for the officials and spokespeople to practice spinning a line of bull when they don't have a clue about what's really happening.
The preliminary reports from TOPOFF 3 had everybody congratulating themselves on how smoothly things went. That means they didn't learn much from it and didn't locate problems. Which means the problems will bite them in the ass in a real emergency.
The information on the exercise is pretty sketchy. But I don't see anything about tracing cases or finding people who don't go to hospitals for treatment (which would be a big problem in a real outbreak.) Instead, they appear to have devised an exersize that addresses the problems uncovered in TOPOFF 1 -- people showed up at hospitals and buried the clinical staff. By the end of that exercise, the triage system had completely collapsed.
reflection's right, these preparedness exercises go on all the time (sample schedule). They went on before 9/11. But nobody was training for what actually happened -- nor could they.
The whole problem with mass casualty terrrorism is one of scale. You only have a limited amount of time (typically an hour or so) to get help to the people who won't survive without immediate assistance - the so-called golden hour.
At a certain scale of casualties, you can't get enough help to enough people fast enough.
So the exercises and training help improve response at the low end of the scale. A couple of years ago, they held a mass casualty exercise in Seattle. The next day, a nut shot a bus driver and sent a bus off the Aurora Bridge. There were 20-30 casualties. The fire and emergency crews said that if they hadn't been practicing the day before, they probably wouldn't have been able to respond as quickly and as a result they saved some lives that probably would have been lost otherwise.
This is the only case I know of where there was a public health benefit.
More typical was the boondoggle known as Northern Exposure (cached). That was a pointless clusterfuck which appears to have been put together so some crooked officials could hire their buddies and pocket a bunch of FEMA funds. As I recall, the head of the regional task force got a county to apply for the grant. The county hired a PR firm that employed the task force head as a consultant. One hand washes the other.
The problem with these boondoggles is that they actually degrade security and increase vulnerability through a false sense of preparedness, combined with the usual opportunity graft, theft and embezzlement.
posted by warbaby at 11:39 PM on April 23, 2005
The preliminary reports from TOPOFF 3 had everybody congratulating themselves on how smoothly things went. That means they didn't learn much from it and didn't locate problems. Which means the problems will bite them in the ass in a real emergency.
The information on the exercise is pretty sketchy. But I don't see anything about tracing cases or finding people who don't go to hospitals for treatment (which would be a big problem in a real outbreak.) Instead, they appear to have devised an exersize that addresses the problems uncovered in TOPOFF 1 -- people showed up at hospitals and buried the clinical staff. By the end of that exercise, the triage system had completely collapsed.
reflection's right, these preparedness exercises go on all the time (sample schedule). They went on before 9/11. But nobody was training for what actually happened -- nor could they.
The whole problem with mass casualty terrrorism is one of scale. You only have a limited amount of time (typically an hour or so) to get help to the people who won't survive without immediate assistance - the so-called golden hour.
At a certain scale of casualties, you can't get enough help to enough people fast enough.
So the exercises and training help improve response at the low end of the scale. A couple of years ago, they held a mass casualty exercise in Seattle. The next day, a nut shot a bus driver and sent a bus off the Aurora Bridge. There were 20-30 casualties. The fire and emergency crews said that if they hadn't been practicing the day before, they probably wouldn't have been able to respond as quickly and as a result they saved some lives that probably would have been lost otherwise.
This is the only case I know of where there was a public health benefit.
More typical was the boondoggle known as Northern Exposure (cached). That was a pointless clusterfuck which appears to have been put together so some crooked officials could hire their buddies and pocket a bunch of FEMA funds. As I recall, the head of the regional task force got a county to apply for the grant. The county hired a PR firm that employed the task force head as a consultant. One hand washes the other.
The problem with these boondoggles is that they actually degrade security and increase vulnerability through a false sense of preparedness, combined with the usual opportunity graft, theft and embezzlement.
posted by warbaby at 11:39 PM on April 23, 2005
You fools! TOPOFF is just a ruse to distract everyone from the impending Pole Shift caused by Planet X!
http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta9.htm
posted by nanojath at 12:43 AM on April 24, 2005
http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta9.htm
posted by nanojath at 12:43 AM on April 24, 2005
The simple truth is, the nature of terror leaves us open to it. We cannot have a nation with any pretense of liberty at all if we wish to destroy terrorism.
With the right to purchase even household products unsupervised, a clever terrorist could create a bomb large enough to take out a small crowd. The 2nd amendment, the holiest words outside of the Christian Bible to many right-wingers, protects the right to possess something that can be used to kill a dozen or more people in a rampage.
We have not made a dent in the "War on Terror", and we cannot like this. Even capturing Osama bin Laden, Bush's solemn vow, would be a propaganda victory at best.
Instead, we remain afraid. We remain afraid of an enemy that could be anyone, but we like to pretend that it's going to be some angry bearded guy with brown skin and a towel on his head, not some fat white guy with a lot of guns and goes to church every week. We are afraid of an enemy that isn't really there, and we're not really sure who it is.
posted by Saydur at 1:06 AM on April 24, 2005
With the right to purchase even household products unsupervised, a clever terrorist could create a bomb large enough to take out a small crowd. The 2nd amendment, the holiest words outside of the Christian Bible to many right-wingers, protects the right to possess something that can be used to kill a dozen or more people in a rampage.
We have not made a dent in the "War on Terror", and we cannot like this. Even capturing Osama bin Laden, Bush's solemn vow, would be a propaganda victory at best.
Instead, we remain afraid. We remain afraid of an enemy that could be anyone, but we like to pretend that it's going to be some angry bearded guy with brown skin and a towel on his head, not some fat white guy with a lot of guns and goes to church every week. We are afraid of an enemy that isn't really there, and we're not really sure who it is.
posted by Saydur at 1:06 AM on April 24, 2005
So what's a POD? I didn't see anyone explain what that stands for.
posted by revgeorge at 6:08 AM on April 24, 2005
posted by revgeorge at 6:08 AM on April 24, 2005
from the linked article: "PODs (points of dispensation) were set up around the county..."
The purpose of this exercise appears involve demonstrating antibiotics can be distributed fast enough to nip a pneumonic plague outbreak. In previous TOPOFF's, the whole system broke down over this aspect.
There is a real world outbreak of pneumonic plague in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the real world, contact tracing (locating all the infected individuals) is the most important and serious part of dealing with an epidemic outbreak. The bioattack drills generally ignore the public health aspects and pretend everything can be dealt with on a clinical basis.
Oh, and in case you're feeling at ease, one little word: Marburg.
posted by warbaby at 7:06 AM on April 24, 2005
The purpose of this exercise appears involve demonstrating antibiotics can be distributed fast enough to nip a pneumonic plague outbreak. In previous TOPOFF's, the whole system broke down over this aspect.
There is a real world outbreak of pneumonic plague in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the real world, contact tracing (locating all the infected individuals) is the most important and serious part of dealing with an epidemic outbreak. The bioattack drills generally ignore the public health aspects and pretend everything can be dealt with on a clinical basis.
Oh, and in case you're feeling at ease, one little word: Marburg.
posted by warbaby at 7:06 AM on April 24, 2005
The fake reports apparently served a very real purpose in the exercise - quite often the authorities involved get their first (and best) accounts of what happening from reporters and TV. This was intended to simulate the "fog of war" - most of the participants in TOPOFF had no idea of the scenario involved - they needed to sort through what was going on, what was linked and what was happening. I believe that a part of the scenario also simulated at least one official stating something incorrect that would lead to a "panic" among the civilian population. (Anyone remember Tom Clancy on CNN on 9/11?).
posted by rshah21 at 12:54 PM on April 25, 2005
posted by rshah21 at 12:54 PM on April 25, 2005
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posted by graventy at 6:06 PM on April 23, 2005