Terror Drills, A huge waste of time, money and resources?

Great Debates
1

This week, several cities, including Chicago, are participating in Terror Drills, to simulate plane crashes, bubonic plague outbreaks and lab attacks across the Northern Illinois area. In Chicago alone, this costs $16 million and is utilizing 8500 volunteers (who get a free t-shirt I should mention).

Meanwhile, yesterday, hospitals were packed with “victims” wandering around,chatting, giggling, (there was a ton of news coverage) and receiving “treatment” from real doctors and nurses. What if something had happened? Giant, flaming car crashes are not unheard of here, not to mention multi alarm fires and whathave you. I’m not saying that they would ignore the real victims in favor of fake, but the fake victims were choking the emergency room, the lobby, the doctor’s time…and that’s just one example.

This morning, there was some strange police activity up in Hoffmann Estates, here in chicago, involving police and swat teams from five different suburbs, and the news spent at least ten minutes on air trying to figure out if it was real news, or a drill. I heard that at 7:00 am and I still don’t know what the hell is going on.

We can’t know for sure how anyone will attack, and we can’t be sure how victims will react. I’ll tell you right now, if I’m exposed to the bubonic plague or whathaveyou, I’m not going to calmly file into the hospital and fill out forms in triplicate.

You want a drill? Send a million people into the street running for their lives, jamming every phone line and bringing public transportation to a screeching halt.

Seems to me, that we can never be fully prepared for a terrorist attack. If we had had drills three years ago, would they have included preparation for the toppling of two gigantic buildings and the subsequent demolishing of several more? I doubt it.

2

I expect that you are correct about this being a colossal waste of time and money. You can’t really prepare for a terrorist attacks. You can do your best to minimize the chance of it occuring and perhaps minimize the amount of damage it does. I certainly think that one can tell people what to do in these circumstances and also to teach emergency personnel how to handle it, but if something massive were to happen it would still cause a panic that would screw everything up.

I think that what we’re seeing is an attempt on the part of the governments (city, state, and national) to show that “they are doing something” about terrorism.

3

I should make a correction. The 8500 volunteers got t-shirts AND a free apple.

Not to mention road closures, runway closures and people gone from work (the AMA in chicago supplied volunteers for the whole morning)

4

They might be a gigantic waste of time, then again maybe not. I have worked in Disaster Recovery and Business Resumption Planning for the last 15 years, and from my perspective these things are necessary. True you will never know for certain when or how a terrorist attack will occur, however if you anticipate that one will happen then you must prepare.

Let me draw a business analogy. When preparing a DR plan for a business you first assess what are the critical systems or processes to the business, how long you can live without them, and what will it take to 1. restore them and 2. recover them. This involves lots of detail planning, and lots of guessing. Then once all the plans and procedures are in place you exercise the plan.

In every case, no plan survives unchanged. That’s because you can’t anticipate the nature of the disaster or the “oops” moments you’ll run into. Along the lines of “You mean we’re going to need a backup of THAT data?” In any case, by running through the plan you’re verifying that the assumptions you’ve made in your planning are accurate, that your plan is workable, and that the people you’ve charged with certain tasks in your plan are actually up to the job.

To perform these tests you don’t need to know the nature of the disaster that will strike your business, all that is needed is the assumption that one or more of those critical systems or processes are not available. I imagine in the terrorist attack tests they’re testing their emergency response plans, the nature of the attack is not that important.

So, yes the tests might be a waste of time, but not if they use them properly.

5

These kind of drills are very useful. Of course, they waste time and ressource. And they never can really simulate the scale of the real event if it happened.
BUT, during such drills, many issues which had been overlooked will be discovered, and the emergency plans will be modified accordingly. Of course other unexpected problems will appear if something happens for real, but at least some issues will have been noticed and hopefully taken care of.

6

but if they operate under the assumption that all victims will be calm, chatty, lining up for their medicine without panic, or, more to the point that PHONES WILL WORK which was obviously not the case on 9/11, is ridiculous.

You can plan how much medicine to have or how many people to staff or who to call based on population numbers on computers. There’s no need to close down half of Midway Airport at rush hour, or take 8500 people from their jobs.

I agree with Galrion. It’s all just like putting on a play to show that Homeland Security is DOING something.

7

At best you are being fatalistic here. Of course you can’t replicate the true horror and panic of a real emergency. But you can assess the basic capabilities of the system and run people through the motions so that everyone is familiar with their roles if everything does go kerboom.

As you pointed out, during true emergencies, everything is chaotic. Wouldn’t you want the professionals responsible for saving lives to have at least some idea of what to do? Maybe if the person digging you out of the rubble has to be wearing a chemical protection suit, it would be a good idea if he/she had actually put one on before? Maybe if the cell phones all go out, it would be useful if the cooperating fire departments knew in advance that their two way radios were compatible?

8

I recall sitting in one of my mother’s risk assessment classes when her professor showed the “Duck and Cover” film of the fifties. I remember the professor saying that oftentimes things of this sort reduce the perception of risk in the public’s eyes. In other words, the terror drills give people peace of mind, as well as a rough game plan.