Mr. Seawitch has worked for Disney security for the last six years. You’d be surprised at both the tight security, and at the holes in it. You couldn’t get a car bomb to do damage from the parking lot, no. But there are a lot of access roads leading in to the park (I ain’t sayin’ where) now heavily guarded.
While I’m thinking about it, my house is about a mile away from a naval weapons station. Southern CA also has the Emmys coming up - and we had an overdramatic news story this morning about possible threats to large movie studios… I mean, propaganda farms.
Meg you forget that Colorado (and the Rockies in general) is one of the prime souces of water for much of the Midwest and much of the Southwest (and even some of Southern California).
A wacko with some chemical agent could fly along the Continental Divide and potentially wipe out hundreds of thousands of people immediately and then devastate the majority of the livestock and farming industries of the country. Thus starving much of America and for that matter the world.
It would also wipe out a number of America’s major brewerys.
Mods: feel free to knock this off the screen. In my mind this is far too doable. (Binny isn’t a doper is he?)
Blowing something up with a regular old bomb is a lot more cost-effective than trying some Blofeld-style destruction of an ecosystem.
If the US suffered a significant hit to its food supply, the rest of the world suffer more because the US government will use all of its resources to feed its own citizens, while the rest of the world won’t get any, including countries like Russia, who wouldn’t be too happy about this and would likely then decide to join the fray.
You want to disrupt 300,000 people in one day ? How about nailing the Bay Bridge. If they do bomb it, I hope it’s before I get to work, otherwise it’ll be hell to get back in the city.
During peak hours, a plane could wipe out hundreds of people on the Bay Bridge and disrupt the entire area for years.
I was reading an article at sfgate.com that said the Coast Guard has increased patrols in the bay making sure that no sea vessel is hijacked.
I was thinking in terms of something closer to San Antonio. On their previous outing, they didn’t really fly very far, presumably wanting a full tank of fuel. So I’d think that all the “really out West” sites, like the Golden Gate Bridge and Disneyland, would be too far away.
But I dunno. To paraphrase the Book of Proverbs:
Thanks all.
Are there any symbols of America’s political, financial, or military power in New Orleans? Houston? NASA?
If we are to believe the initially stated scenario that the Pennsylvania crash was headed to Camp David, they could be heading for Bush’s Crawford ranch, or maybe the capitol in Austin for old time’s sake.
Where’s Papa George these days, still Houston’s River Oaks?
Disney World is just a stone’s throw from San Antonio. If the flight were headed for, say, NYC, there would still be plenty of fuel on board to make one hell of a mess. Then again, it’s not the peak season. There are also several football games planned for tomorrow. Most college ball games pack in over 75,000 per game. The death toll could very easily be much higher than that of the WTC.
Hijacking an airplane isn’t going to be easy under today’s heightened security. Also, the Air Force is going to respond to any strange movements by a plane right now much more quickly than on 9/11.
So, if you left from San Antonio and tried to fly a plane over to Orlando that was headed to NYC, the Air Force would have a lot more time to catch up with it.
In at least three different instances, which I’ve either read on the AP wire, read on an article linked from the Drudge Report, or heard on the BBC World Service from one of their correspondents, it is still actually quite easy to smuggle a Phillips-head screwdriver, small knife, or box-cutter past airport security, even unwittingly.
While I hope that the actions of those aboard Flight 93 would hearten passengers these days to disrupt any potential attempts, and realize that airline employees, undercover cops, and BBC correspondents may slip under the “profiling” radar, the fact remains that another hijacking is a terribly real possibility.
And who says the terrorists need be Arabic or Middle Eastern? Timothy McVeigh was a lot of things, but “Arabic in appearance” wasn’t one of them.
Everyone knows this country has more fruits, flakes and nuts than a bowl of granola.
As for Air Force response time, I hope it never has a chance to be put into practice. But if it does, and the hijacked plane is over a city, exactly how can a pilot decide which part of a populated area to shoot down an airliner? A hijacker with a modicum of piloting skills could easily use the populace below as additional “hostages” by keeping the airliner low and overhead, or even heading to a more densely populated part of a city.
If anything were to happen around LA, I’d have to say the TransAmerica building, to keep up with market and economic disruption.
Then there’s any number of Hollywood studios that could take a beating… Disneyland, Disney’s California Adventure (or whatever that money sink is called), the Golden Gate or Bay Bridges…
It would be a neat trick for someone to move the TransAmerica building from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The tallest building on the West Coast is in Los Angeles and I would wager that if you asked the average person on the street, 95% of people wouldn’t know the name of the building or its exact location.
As for the UCLA-OSU football game, I’ve returned home in one piece. But there was a lot of traffic.
One of the more frightening things I’ve heard in the last couple of days is that the FBI announced today that they found the flight manual for a crop duster today in one of the terrorist apartments.
They are calling the threat ‘low’ without other evidence, but try to imagine what a crop duster full of chemical or biological agents could do if flown over any metro area, east or west.
Point given, but my point is that the TransAmerica is a valid target in California, I think. A transcontinental flight could leave LA and have a whole lot of fuel left if it were to get to San Fran.
