Summaries of terrorist incidents
	Photo by Andrea Booher/ FEMA News Photo
	World Trade Center, New York City, 2001

At the World Trade Center, 450 emergency responders perished in the response to the terrorist attacks--about one-sixth of the total number of victims. Hundreds more were seriously injured. In this light, the terrorist events are also forcing emergency responders to reconsider the equipment and practices they use to protect themselves in the line of duty. A firefighter observed, "We had an incident at the FBI [headquarters] soon after the incident in New York. I was looking at the battalion chief on the scene and watching them operate under a cantilevered structure. I asked them, 'Why don't you move everybody further away so if that thing does come down you won't get killed?' New York taught me a lot about firefighter safety."

The terrorist incidents
The broad outlines of the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the autumn 2001 anthrax incidents are well known. In many ways, the events differed greatly. The World Trade Center event was much larger than the others in scale, the amount of damage that occurred, lives lost, and the number of responders involved. Its location in downtown Manhattan made managing the scene very complex. The Pentagon attack occurred at a building whose location facilitated rapid site control. The Murrah Building attack was similar in scale to the Pentagon attack but presented additional difficulties because of its location within an urban area: Adjacent buildings were impacted but not destroyed, and isolating the site was more difficult. The anthrax attacks consisted of a series of biohazard incidents involving cases of real contamination, false alarms, and hoaxes, spread over several months and many jurisdictions nationwide.

Despite their differences, these terrorist incidents and the responses to them share several characteristics that set them apart from most other events requiring emergency response: They were large in scale, long in duration, and presented an array of hazards, many of them unusual. In addition, unlike most other large-scale disaster scenes, the terrorist-attack sites are also crime scenes requiring preservation and collection of evidence for investigation and prosecution. Because of these characteristics, these events thrust responders into new roles for which they may not have been properly prepared or equipped.

The themes of scale, duration, and range of hazards were repeated frequently during the discussions at the conference because they were seen as having critical implications for protecting the health and safety of emergency responders--during both the immediate, urgent phase and the sustained campaign phase of the responses.

Long term campaigns
Conventional emergency situations, such as building fires, typically require responders to face risks for discrete and short periods of time, usually measured in minutes or hours. Most personal protective equipment (PPE) and operating procedures are designed for such situations. In contrast, the responses to the terrorist attacks involved days and weeks of constant work. At the World Trade Center, an initial urgent phase persisted for several days and then gradually transitioned into a sustained campaign that lasted for several months.

	Summaries of terrorist incidents
	DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Cedric H. Rudisill
	Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, 2001

For those who had it, structural firefighting gear--including helmet, self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) or air pack, and turnout gear (thermally insulated coat, pants, and boots)--worked well for short periods, especially during the initial responses. However, this equipment is not suitable for a sustained campaign. Fire service helmets are heavy and can hinder performance. In addition to SCBA being heavy and cumbersome, the facepieces fog, reducing visibility, and the equipment hinders verbal and radio communication. The air pack makes it difficult to fit into confined spaces. With limited air in each tank, bottles at the attack sites had to be switched, but many organizations lacked sufficient on-site refill capacity. In many cases, responders reported that air-purifying respirator (APR) filter cartridges were used far longer than they were designed to be used, resulting in filters becoming clogged and the respirators being rendered ineffective. Many respirators were uncomfortable, causing "mask face," which motivated many workers to discard them after short periods or use a lighter dust mask instead. Some cut slits in their masks to facilitate smoking. "To cut right to the chase," stated one firefighter, "the equipment that we have isn't comfortable or practical for a long duration."

Turnout gear is heavy and hot, and many responders suffered from fatigue and heat exhaustion. Contact lenses tended to dry out when worn with respirators for long periods. Wet shoes and socks caused blisters. Trades panel members believed that many more workers than were reported had blisters but simply self-medicated or tried to ignore them. Because of the discomfort, responders would take off their gear whenever they believed they could do so without causing immediate harm, leaving them with no protection at all.

Following the announcement of the first case of anthrax exposure in early October 2001, law-enforcement and other emergency responders had to follow up on an avalanche of calls, the vast majority of them false alarms. Postal inspectors alone investigated thousands of cases of possible anthrax in the following months. With the large scale of the response, attitudes toward potential health and safety risks associated with anthrax changed. In many instances, they were relaxed. In the words of one firefighter, "Two years ago, we would have been on the scene for five hours. Now guys are off the scene in five minutes."

Large-scale events
The terrorist incidents were noted for their large scale, as epitomized by the twin towers of the World Trade Center (the largest office complex in the world), the Pentagon (the largest office complex under one roof), and the thousands of anthrax scares.

Special-operations personnel spoke extensively about the difficulty of conducting search and rescue, fire-suppression, and shoring and stabilization operations at the Pentagon because of the building's massive size and the extent of the damage. Given the scale of the disaster at the World Trade Center, firefighters were forced into a defensive status where they extinguished fires in some adjacent buildings but had to let others burn.

	Summaries of terrorist incidents
	FEMA News Photo
	Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, 1995

A key component in protecting the health and safety of emergency responders is having the logistical framework necessary to provide them with needed equipment and supplies. Logistical management of the World Trade Center site, particularly in the early days, was overwhelming. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone distributed 10,000 respirators at the site in the first few weeks. "We had [flood]lights come in from Iowa. We had $180,000 in six-by-sixes [timbers] delivered in the first four hours," observed an emergency medical services (EMS) panel member. Another on the panel said, "It was so big geographically, that things were happening remote of you that you had no clue of. The majority of my victims were transported by private automobiles, even though we had an enormous treatment and triage area set up. Enormous!" One construction-and-other-trades panel member went so far as to describe the situation as "a nightmare. People were offering everything and stuff was coming from everywhere. I didn't know who had what, where it was, or how to get it to where it was needed if I did know where it was." Because of the sheer size of the site, logistics at the Trade Center had to be divided into multiple zones to make it possible to stage supplies near enough to workers.

In the case of the September 11 attacks, responses were hampered by collateral developments. The arrival in New York City of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams, emergency supplies, and Incident Support Team (IST) was delayed for days by the grounding of commercial air transport. USAR task forces that did reach the area labored without their planned coordination and backup. "Everybody sat in airports, so there was no IST for two, three days," said one firefighter-special-operations panelist. "It had a big effect. The first time I talked to anybody on a FEMA radio off-site was on the third day because they just didn't get there."

Given the large number of responding agencies, communications and coordination became essential. Yet both mobile and land-line communication networks in lower Manhattan had been knocked out by the collapse of the World Trade Center. The remaining land lines and wireless networks were overwhelmed by high call volumes. One federal-and-state-agency panel member observed: "The cell tower that was in lower Manhattan was on top of the Trade Center. So when the Trade Center went down, cellular phone communications went with it. When parts of the Trade Center went through the sidewalk and into the basement of the Verizon building, hard-line communications went with that."

	Summaries of terrorist incidents
	FBI File Photo
	Anthrax Incidents, 2001

In addition, the sheer scale of the incident made it very difficult to get information about the health and safety risks that were present. A major role of specialist firefighters, especially hazmat specialists, is risk assessment through the use of chemical-agent monitors and other assessment technologies. As one firefighter put it, "If your management system's working correctly, you can dish that off to your specialist people." At the World Trade Center, the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) lost much of its early reconnaissance capability when the firefighters and hazmat/special-operations personnel were killed in the building collapses. Afterwards, risk-assessment specialists reported having problems getting their equipment to work because of the amount of smoke and dust, which caused a large number of false readings. And even when people were available to do it, gathering data was difficult because of the large size of the disaster site.

When the autumn 2001 anthrax episode is considered in total, the multiple individual responses also represent a large-scale event. The thousands of "white-powder events" and "anthrax rides" imposed significant manpower, equipment, and logistics burdens on emergency-response units across the country.