Terror response: A tale of three cities

Calls in Portland, calm in the Sierra
While in past alerts Portland, Maine’s largest city, added police and fire shifts that cost some $5,000 a week, this time the  response was measured.

Deputy Police Chief Tim Burton says most of the city’s response took place on the phone and in small, internal agency meetings.

Burton learned of the London attacks at 5:30 a.m., from Portland’s emergency communications center. After conferring with city officials, he says, it was decided the response should be primarily informational, “contacting the transportation facilities locally and conferring with them on measures to be taken to ensure that they were exercising due diligence.” He also said local emergency agencies reviewed agreed upon procedures for changes in the national threat level.”

But, he said, “no additional staff have been added today.”

Even less urgency prevailed 2,300 miles to the west in Markleeville, Calif., the Alpine County seat. The county took some heat locally in 2003 and 2004 when newspapers in Los Angeles and Ventura County learned that the tiny, rural jurisdiction had received nearly 20 percent more money per capita for homeland security preparedness than California’s major cities.

Still, experts say Thursday’s alert hardly argues for a rush to the breaches in the high Sierra. The county, located south of Lake Tahoe, contains no mass transit or train lines, taking an orange alert under advisement rather than pulling out all the stops is probably the wise move. “What specific guidance could a small town glean from Chertoff’s statement?” Kayyem of Harvard asked. “He said no credible threats, and while that’s not particularly reassuring, it doesn’t beg any particular action, either.”

More information, please
The lack of specific guidance leaves local government leaders with a terrible dilemma: order overtime shifts and run up a huge bill that may harm the local government’s fiscal health, or ignore the alert and risk political crucifixion if something does happen. Adding to the problem, cities say, is uncertainty about who will pick up the tab. While the federal government pledges to reimburse such costs, cities are wary of a system that funnels their money through state budgets first, complaining that a “trickle down” affect leaves them short.

“I guess there are two shades of orange," O'Malley quipped. "Sometimes we get reimbursed, sometimes it seems not to happen. But one way or another, we do the responsible thing to protect the public. We’re willing to pay if it comes to that.”

The GAO concluded in a January report that in past alerts some municipalities accrued enormous costs, most related to overtime for emergency and law enforcement workers, or the deployment of National Guard troops. Others, the study found, decided to do nothing because the information appeared too vague to act on.

“This color system is like a terrorism “mood ring,’ it just is not an effective system,” says Larry Johnson, a former head of counter-terrorism at the State Department. “You have to be able to tell people what to do if you want them to act, and our system does not do that. Instead, this will result in a temporary boost of patrols around subways and metros with no particular threat to go on just so politicians can be seen to be doing something. In reality, though, it’s like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, and then going inside and spending a whole lot of time and money looking for the horses.”

One thing that may mitigate costs this time around, however, is the fact that Chertoff very specifically singled out trains and mass transit – even specifically excluding airports. That follows recommendations from mayors and governors, echoed by GAO reports and other expert testimony, that questioned the value, wisdom and cost-effectiveness of the kinds of blanket orange alerts that occurred more frequently in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

In its report, GAO noted that in the past: “public warnings did not include guidance on actions to be taken in response to a specific threat.”

This time, Chertoff went out of his way to be specific, even to the point of excluding airports. "I want to emphasize that: targeted only to the mass transit portion of the transportation sector," Chertoff told reporters.

MSNBC.com intern Caroline Kim contributed to this report.

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