Forever changed

By Charles Sowell  

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009 4:16 a.m. (0)

These days, anyone going into any state office building in Columbia must show a picture ID.

The fishing piers just downstream of the powerhouse at the Hartwell Dam are closed.

And the Federal Dam Safety Administration doesn’t list dams anymore on its Web site.

They are but a few of the changes – large and small *– made to everyday life since terrorists hijacked four airplanes on this day eight years ago, killing more than 2,600 at the World Trade Center, 125 at the Pentagon and 256 on the planes.

More people died that day than in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It remains the worst terrorist attack in American history.

In the years since, the terror alert has risen to the highest level once for overseas flights; it has never fallen below yellow on the national level. Billions of dollars has been spent while the nation watches for the next attack. In South Carolina alone since 2003, $270 million has been spent on homeland security.

The experts who watch what’s going on say they feel certain another attack will come and succeed, but they say the odds of it happening in South Carolina are small.

Potential terror targets include vital infrastructure, power transmission facilities and nuclear stations; government buildings and large public gatherings; the anniversary of 9.11 is always a dangerous time.

“Because so much of what goes on under the umbrella of Homeland Security is secret we have no idea how many attempts against us have been thwarted,” said Susan Cutter, professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and director of the University’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute.

It is a major part of her job to assess threats from a variety of sources, including terrorists. She’s the author of a dozen books.

“I can’t tell you if we’re safer, or not, today because I just don’t know,” she said. “It’s my job to study these things and I can tell you it is frustrating.”

No one knows what might happen. A publication of the South Carolina Emergency Preparedness Division about terrorism says simply, “Prepare for the unexpected.”

In the years since 9.11 the most obvious security changes have come at airports and on the borders. But virtually every agency, every business has been forced to look at how they might be threatened.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stopped giving tours of power stations and closed the access road to the fishing piers at Hartwell because the road ran too close to the powerhouse, said Billy Birdwell, a Corps spokesman.

It was a matter of deciding what was vulnerable and what was not, Birdwell said. The dams are pretty sturdy structures.

Thanks to the efforts of Georgia’s DNR and a timely grant, the piers will reopen in a few months, Birdwell said.

“We’re in the process of moving the (access) road away from the powerhouse and will have new facilities open to the public soon.”

The State Law Enforcement Division has been the lead agency tasked with Homeland Security on the state level for the past six and a half years, said Jennifer Timmons, SLED spokesperson.

The agency has a budget for Homeland security operations of $1.2 million in state money; $5.7 million in federal funds; and $18.9 million in federal funds that are passed through to other agencies.

On the most local of levels, at Greenville County Emergency Management, Director Scot Wendelken has no idea what his agency’s budget is.

“We’re folded in with the Sheriff’s budget,” he said. “We’re a very small shop with four people and one part time position. Most of our budget goes for salaries and things like office supplies.”

Mostly they coordinate and do threat assessments for infrastructure, Wendelken said.

SLED does that, too, albeit on a much larger scale. Timmons said, “SLED has not mandated that public sites restrict access. SLED has provided recommendations to facilities, in coordination with local, state and federal partners to increase security.”

Duke Energy spokesman Andy Thompson would not talk about the security measures at sites like the Oconee Nuclear Station, yet it is generally acknowledged by Homeland Security that such facilities are high on its terrorist target list.

Cutter said one development in the frenzy after 9.11 has been that some subjects are not open for discussion for good reason and some defy logic. Like the Dam Safety Administration taking its list of dams off the Internet.

“That seems kind of silly when any road atlas will show you where the dams are (most have roads running over them) and you can look them up using Google Earth, too,” Cutter said.

Researchers lost a valuable tool and the public gained little security benefit.

“When we talk about terrorism in this post 9.11 world, most of us think about the big, spectacular attacks like the Twin Towers and the Pentagon,” she said. “But the fact of the matter is our own, home-grown terrorists (like the Klan, right-wing militias, and eco-terrorists) have a long history in this country.”

Most of the courthouse security measures in place today date from the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. It was the most devastating act of terror ever on American soil before 9.11.The blast, set off by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, killed 168 and injured 680.

“Our home grown terrorists, by and large, have not had the kind of spectacular attacks that al Qaeda has,” Cutter said. “But the carnage they’ve managed to produce in aggregate has been substantial.

Since 1972, terrorists have threatened Midwest water supplies with typhoid bacteria, Oregon salad bars with salmonella, blown up a vehicle in the World Trade Center, and sent letters containing anthrax. Closer to home, ricin was found in 2003 in a package in the sorting station for the Greenville Post Office. A similar letter was found in a White House mail room the next month.

SLED did not answer questions about its efforts against domestic terrorists.

“These local folks have not gotten the attention that Osama Bin Laden has and I find that disturbing,” Cutter said.