Security task force uses past to guide reforms

Post-Sept. 11 safeguards reflect a new readiness at ports, bridges, hospitals and among rescue workers.

By JEAN HELLER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 28, 2002

Troopers regularly check the Sunshine Skyway bridge for bombs.

Firefighters carry antidotes against biological and chemical weapons.

Hospitals link computers to diagnose potential epidemics.

And deputies guard the Port of Tampa 24 hours a day, mindful of the toxic materials stored there.

Coordinating it all is a nine-county task force, one of seven formed statewide by Gov. Jeb Bush in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Task force members have spent the past six months shoring up security and preparing for the worst.

Along the way, they have learned what to do and what not to do.

Lesson 1: Talk to the public.

"Early on during the anthrax scare, what we didn't do well was communicate with the public," said Jim Sewell, regional director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and co-chairman of the task force.

"Part of the reason is that we were caught off guard. But people were scared. They knew some people had anthrax, and then knew some people had died. They needed more information, and we didn't give it to them."

Lesson 2: Set aside interagency turf considerations and communicate specifics.

"We told the feds they couldn't just come out and say the whole country's on red alert," Sewell said, referring to federal terrorism alerts in the weeks after Sept. 11. "If there's a threat against a bridge in the Southeast, tell us, and we'll look at bridges a whole different way. But if they just say there's a national threat that might involve transportation of some kind, what can we possibly do with information that vague?"

Lesson 3: Think like a terrorist.

Officials are certain this country will face another major terrorist act. It might not happen in the Tampa Bay region, but it could. The key is anticipation.

"Terrorists look for targets with a lot of bodies, a lot of collateral damage that will impact the infrastructure and disrupt our way of life," Sewell said. "Or they look for symbolic targets to send a message. We have a lot of venues in this state that fit into one of those categories."

A united approach

The Regional Domestic Security Task Force members include representatives from law enforcement, fire-rescue, medical, emergency management, legal, corporate and education. It covers Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Hernando, Citrus, Polk, Sumter, Manatee and Hardee counties.

For the past six months, members have developed strategies to deal with terrorism here. They have practiced for the worst by playing out mock disasters and grading their performances. They have studied vulnerable points of potential targets and increased security where needed.

For example, most federal resources have been spent on protecting the nation's 429 commercial airports. No one was appointed to oversee security for maritime and highway transportation until last month, eight months after Sept. 11. But plenty of local attention is focused on such potential targets as seaports and bridges.

So while Tampa International Airport is closely monitored, so is the Port of Tampa, Port Manatee, the Sunshine Skyway, the Howard Frankland Bridge, Florida Power's Crystal River nuclear power plant, MacDill Air Force Base, Raymond James Stadium, the Ice Palace and Busch Gardens.

One of the tragic revelations of Sept. 11 was how poorly the nation's police, fire-rescue workers and medical personnel, the first on the scene of a disaster, are trained to protect themselves.

"We train cops and fire/rescue to go to an event and enter the event and help people out," Sewell said. "That's not always the best way, as we saw in New York. We don't want to find out we have a bioterrorism incident when first responders start going down."

On Sept. 11, only 45 percent of the 5,000 fire and emergency medical personnel in the Tampa Bay task force region had any training in response to a weapon of mass destruction.

"By Jan. 1, we had that number up to 71 percent, and it's over 90 percent today," said division chief Doug Lewis of the St. Petersburg Fire Department. "The training focuses on awareness of the presence of chemical and biological agents and also any secondary devices set to kill first responders."

While all firefighters have long been issued equipment to protect them against any substance for a short period, Pinellas and Hillsborough personnel now have what is called Level C protection, which protects longer and better than older gear.

Within a few weeks, all fire, emergency medical and hazmat personnel will carry stockpiles of antibiotics and antidotes in their vehicles to treat themselves and victims of a biological or chemical attack.

The task force also has a major stockpile of antibiotics and antidotes, which became the object of a lesson in January, when a teenager crashed a stolen Cessna into a Tampa office building.

"What if the plane had been carrying a deadly virus, hanging there, open to the wind?" said Daniel Haight, director of Polk County's department of health. "We had antibiotics and antidotes stockpiled, but they were all in North Tampa. If we'd had a disaster over a wide area, we couldn't have reached everyone. We learned from that. We dispersed the supplies."

Getting an early warning

But what if the terror arrives quietly?

"This is the scenario that really scares us, the unannounced biological attack with no credit taken, no bang," said Lt. Scott Stiner of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.

Enter LEADERS, the Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System which serves as an early warning system to alert health specialists that something going on out in the world isn't right.

It was developed for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to detect biological attacks during major events and was tested at five Tampa Bay area hospitals last year for the Super Bowl. Now its use is growing.

Once LEADERS is installed in a hospital emergency room, medical technicians enter the primary symptom of every patient who comes through. The data is run through a statistical software package every 12 hours, and the results disclose abnormal patterns of illness.

Link up multiple hospitals to the system, and health officials have a powerful tool to catch problems before they get out of hand.

All nine hospitals in Hillsborough County have LEADERS up and running. It is also installed at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg and will be in at least nine more of Pinellas County's 14 hospitals within several months. The next step will be to link the two counties.

"LEADERS won't pick up a single case of anthrax or smallpox; we hope good doctors would spot those," said Jordan Lewis, director of environmental health and epidemiology for Hillsborough County. "But it will pick up bunches."

All of this costs money. The federal government has committed $42-million to help defray the costs of the task forces statewide. The funds pay for specialized medical equipment, breathing equipment and coveralls for first responders, new ambulance equipment, forensics and training.

Many of the 75 separate jurisdictions within the task force's nine counties are spending additional funds of their own.

"This country is ripe for terrorist attempts," Sewell said. "Until Sept. 11, we'd been fortunate that there hadn't been many. . . .

"Now it's all changed. Now we know there are a lot of folks out there willing to go way beyond anything we've ever seen before. We've been warned. Now it's up to us to be ready."

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