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moments after United Airlines Flight 175 hit the north tower of
the Word Trade Center on September 11, Charles F. McClafferty, the
chief financial officer of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, dashed out of his office with a flashlight and a thick binder
containing his agency's emergency plan. New York's seaways and airports
continued working because of the plan in the binder; and McClafferty,
a 67-year old with thick glasses, survived the perilous trip down
a crowded, smoke-filled staircase thanks to his flashlight.
While the horrific
sight of fleeing crowds and jumping office workers gave the appearance
of chaos when the towers collapsed, preparations like McClafferty's
helped to evacuate the buildings with minimal loss of life. Each
passing week has lowered September 11's death toll. The New York
Times reported this week that about 2,900 workers from the Twin
Towers — only about 6 percent of the buildings' total labor
force — died in the attack. Indeed, the World Trade Center
was better prepared for terrorist attack than any other large civilian
complex in the world. In the wake of the 1993 bombing, nearly all
the towers' tenants developed emergency plans, and most gave their
workers emergency kits containing flashlights, facemasks, and evacuation
instructions. Workers practiced evacuations. While the valor, courage,
and professional competence of New York City's police and fire departments
cannot be underestimated, the Trade Center's workers survived the
attack so well in part because the complex had, in effect, a civil-defense
plan.
Civil defense
is a preparedness strategy that asks ordinary civilians to play
a major role in responding to an attack or disaster. In her study
Civil Defense Begins at Home, Whittier College professor
Laura McEnany shows how efforts during the 1950s asked families
to assume a quasi-military role in the event of an attack. While
civil defense reached its apex during World War II — when nearly
every block had its own civil-defense warden — civil defense's
political prominence increased during the Cold War's early years.
In the 1950s, for example, Operation Alert air-raid drills successfully
evacuated Times Square during the lunch hour on a weekday, and debates
over civil-defense policy played a role in both 1950s presidential
elections.
Civil defense
withered in the mid 1960s, however, amid the Vietnam era's breakdown
of social consensus and the realization that few could survive an
all-out nuclear war. Civilians did a fine job working in emergency
shelters, providing first aid, and directing evacuations —
but federal, state, and local agencies coordinated their disaster-response
efforts so poorly that citizens often received contradictory information.
In response to a plea from the National Governor's Association,
the Carter administration created the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) in 1979 by merging the Department of Defense's Civil
Defense Preparedness Agency with over 100 disaster-response programs
elsewhere in the federal government. By the mid 1980s, states, counties,
and cities had copied this approach, and emergency management emerged
as a new public-safety profession. FEMA's technocratic, professional
approach saved lives: In 1969, for example, over 250 people perished
when Hurricane Camille made landfall along the Gulf Coast but only
36 people died when 1992's equally powerful Hurricane Andrew hit
dense suburbs in Florida and Louisiana. With enough resources and
advance preparation, government agencies proved highly successful
at responding to predictable, non-malicious disasters. Civilians,
it seemed by the mid-1990s, needed to do little more than follow
instructions, and even the worst disasters would pass with minimal
loss of life.
Another terrorist
attack on the scale of September 11's, however, will likely require
more resources than many governments can muster in a snap. Unlike
natural disasters, terrorist attacks involve human malice and can
happen nearly anywhere: Terrorists might, for instance, set off
a car bomb in the office district of a mid-sized city, then open
fire in a nearby shopping mall as all of the city's police and firefighters
rush to the first disaster scene. There's no way to predict what
resources the country will need, so involving more citizens will
help even the smallest communities to prepare for the worst.
Police-community
partnerships have flourished during the same period that civilians
have seen their formal role in disaster response vanish, and some
police departments have begun examining how their existing corps
of civilian volunteers might assist emergency workers in the event
of a terrorist attack. Volunteers already do everything from helping
with traffic-speed enforcement near schools to providing tips for
catching burglars. They can certainly return to their civil-defense
role of running shelters and supervising evacuations. At least one
urban police department, in Lowell, Mass., has already begun the
formal process of reviving civil defense. Professional disaster
management has proven its worth in responding to most natural disasters,
but the exigencies of the fight against terror will require competent,
disciplined, and valorous corps of civilians ready to respond to
whatever calamities might strike their cities.
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