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Release Date: 05/05/03 00:00:00
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 5, 2003
SECRETARY RIDGE: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm pleased to be joined this afternoon by Undersecretary of State for Management, Grant Green; and the Mayor Seattle, Greg Nichols; Carl Hawkinson, the Homeland Security Advisor for the State of Illinois; and Ted Macklin, Assistant Director for the Office for Domestic Preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security.
Beginning next Monday, May 12th, at 3:00 p.m., the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, working in conjunction with federal, state, local, and Canadian partners, will commence a five-day, full-scale exercise to measure and analyze a response to a terrorist attack.
Top-Off 2 details a fictitious sequence of events that model a terrorist campaign employing weapons of mass destruction.
I remind everyone that in the late '90s, Congress mandated that the Executive Branch, working with the state and locals, hold this top official exercises. This is the second exercise in that series.
Specifically, this exercise will simulate a radiological device explosion in Seattle and a covert biological attack in Chicago.
All in all, 25 federal agencies, as well as the American Red Cross, will become involved during the five-day exercise, and you could well imagine the departments and agencies of both states, and not only the counties in Illinois that are -- where the cities of Chicago and Seattle reside, but some of the adjacent counties will be affected as well.
Additionally, the government of Canada, including the province of British Columbia and the city of Vancouver, will be engaged in the exercises. The participation of Canada in Top Off 2 is in keeping with our commitment to conduct joint exercises, as outlined in point 30 of the Smart Border Declaration Action Plan.
Actually, Canada and the United States have a history of conducting joint counterterrorism exercises dating back to, I think, 1989.
Now, the exercise scenario and the extent of damage are based on a hypothetical situation. They do reflect plausible threats to the United States. That said, however, no actual explosives or other harmful substances will be used.
To the citizens of Chicago and Seattle, specifically, and to all Americans, let me be very, very clear. This is a simulation, this is a test, this is an exercise. You may see real first responders actually working at simulated scenes and treating volunteers who pretend to be victims.
If you happen to be visiting one of the local hospitals in these communities you may see some of the hospital staff wearing masks or protective gear as they treat these volunteer victims or simulate a pharmaceutical distribution. But, again, the attack is not real. It is simply a simulation. It is a test of our response capacity. But over the course of the next five days, the response will be as realistic as possible.
Top Off 2, again, is the second of these congressionally directed national exercises. The first was conducted three years ago, in May of 2000. We learned some valuable lessons during Top Off 1, lessons that I think have helped the country and the states and local governments better prepare for this exercise. And I think, even more importantly, in recent years, helped authorities at all levels take corrective actions to better prepare for possible weapons of mass destruction events.
For example, Top Off 1 showed us that multiple control centers, numerous liaisons, and an increasing number of response teams only complicated coordination and unity of effort. And yet since that time we've established a national strategy for homeland security, we've created a new department focused solely on serving that mission, and we began consolidating our national response plan. And I expect, at the state and local level, that lesson has resulted in a different day to day working relationship between or among the various state and local agencies as well.
Top Off 1 also demonstrated that threat information and a common threat picture need to be shared in a timely manner, which we've remedied significantly with the Homeland Security Advisory System, and more recently with the creation of the Terrorism Threat Integration Center.
We also learned a few other lessons as well. Educating, exercising, and equipping crisis and consequence managers and responders remains a national priority, a need both the Congress and the President addressed by providing much needed funding to authorities through the first responder initiative.
Just as important, Top Off 1 proved that the response required of a large-scale bio-terrorism incident is significantly different from response to other weapons of mass destruction attacks.
Additionally, we saw the fragility in a public health structure that lacked both adequate funding to prepare for a bio-terrorist incident and leadership at the federal level.
Since then the President, with the support of the Congress, has embarked on a major reorganization, not only of the Department of Health and Human Services, but we began to infuse state and local health systems with nearly $1.5 billion in grant money to bring bio-terrorism preparedness to its highest level in history.
Top Off 2 is designed to build on our capabilities. Our objectives are to improve the nation's capacity to save lives in response to a terrorist event. Every day we do everything we can to prevent, deter, and disrupt terrorist activity. But we do have to be prepared in the event an attack occurs, so we train and train to build and enhance our capabilities to respond. We are committed to a higher level of readiness every single day.
As you will see -- as you will see -- and you'll be briefed daily -- we push -- we push the envelope in these types of scenarios. We push decision-making at all levels, local, state, and federal. Something that, again -- the other top official involved in this exercise is Secretary Powell. There's an international component to it as well.
We look to uncover communication and coordination and other problems. To this end, we have included our external partners from the private sector, as well as local, state, and international communities, to serve as observers of this exercise. We also hope people have to make decisions on their feet and be prepared to adapt.
Everybody knows what the general exercise is going to be, but those who planned the exercise and wrote the exercise feel fairly confident, have some conditions which are not anticipated, and certainly some events or conditions that are not public to any of us at this point.
So that's the business that begins on Monday, the national exercise, congressionally mandated, the second in a series of national exercises. We are confident that we will learn much, build on an enhanced capacity that is our responsibility every single day.
As the President said last week, "The enemies of freedom are not idle, and neither are we."
The other top official involved in this exercise, Top Off 2, is the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and representing the Secretary of State is the Undersecretary for Management, Grant Green. Grant?
UNDERSECRETARY GREEN: Thank you, Secretary Ridge. I'm pleased to be here representing the Secretary of State and the Department of State in this exercise.
State's co-sponsorship is a function of the close relationship between the domestic and the international counter-terrorism communities, and I think it's important to highlight that many terrorist incidents that might occur in this country would undoubtedly have significant international implications.
I think, to quote Secretary Powell, he said, "Top Off 2 embodies the spirit of interagency and international cooperation that surfaced in the aftermath of September 11th. It is this cooperation that will help us defeat terrorism."
I'd like now to introduce the Mayor of Seattle, the Honorable Greg Nichols.
MAYOR NICKELS: Thank you. Thank you and good afternoon. It's an honor to be here today with Secretary Ridge, and I want to thank the Secretary and the folks at the Department of Homeland Security for their support, not only in including us in this exercise, Top Off 2, but also last month, in providing -- in announcing funding for Seattle for us to continue our efforts to protect our city.
Since 1999, Seattle has now and then been seen as a possible terrorism target. Even though there's been no specific evidence, we have been working hard to prepare our city. We see Top Off as a great opportunity for us to continue our work and to achieve my goal, which is to make the Seattle the most prepared city in America. That's a goal, I suspect, that is shared by every mayor in America.
To improve our readiness, though, we need to drill, drill, and drill again. And this exercise will test our disaster readiness, our response systems, strengthen our relationships and communication between the local, state, and federal partners.
Our city has been preparing for Top Off 2 for a number of months, and it's part of many actions we have taken to make sure our city is safe. We've created an emergency preparedness bureau within our police department. We have increased the surveillance and security of our city's key infrastructure. And we have given our first responders additional equipment and training to do their job.
As a former governor, Secretary Ridge knows that my job as mayor is very clear, and that is to make sure that the people of my city are safe. And I want to thank the Secretary for helping and being a partner in doing that job.
Now I'd like to introduce the representative of the Governor of the great state of Illinois, Carl Hawkinson.
GOVERNOR HAWKINSON: Thank you, Mayor. Governor Blagojevich is pleased that Illinois was accepted to participate in Top Off 2. We had been preparing for several years for this kind of an event. We have equipped, trained several specialized teams, both in the public health area, as well as in the tactical area. We feel we are well prepared.
But you have to exercise -- in addition to creating these teams, equipping them and training them, you have to exercise. And I think it's important that Governor Ridge is holding this press conference today, will be holding another press conference in Chicago tomorrow, both from the state's and the city's aspects, to remind people that this is just an exercise. But it's a very important one.
We want to see how well we have planned and trained and equipped. We want to stress and test these resources that we have in both the public health area as well as in the other areas.
We also want -- and we are very pleased to have been accepted so that we can not only work with Chicago and other area local governments, but can actually work in an exercise with the federal government, with the Department of Homeland Security, and all of the various agencies to see how well, in real life, that kind of cooperation works.
We're confident that we're well-prepared, but this is a very important exercise. We thank you again, Governor Ridge, for including Illinois.
MR. MACKLIN: Good afternoon. I'm Ted Macklin, Assistant Director for the Office of Domestic Preparedness and the Top Off 2 exercise co-director, along with my colleague from the Department of State, Tom Hastings.
ODP merged into the Department of Homeland Security, along with 21 other federal agencies, some 65 days ago, on March 1, 2003. One of the key programs migrating with ODP from the Department of Justice to the new department was a Top Officials 2, or Top Off 2 national exercise program.
Top Off 2, also known as T-2, is a congressionally directed biennial national combating terrorism exercise series consisting of seven discrete exercise elements whose purpose, as the Secretary said, is to improve the nation's capacity to manage complex terrorism incidents.
The results of T-2, the lessons learned from all seven exercise building blocks, will inform and contribute to periodic measurements of the preparedness and readiness of the nation to respond to terrorist attacks.
The Secretary mentioned the first Top Off exercise which took place three years ago this month, and lessons from that exercise have guided and informed the planning and development of T-2 for the last 22 months.
With the tragic events of September 11, 2001, T-2 planning took on added urgency. The possibility of coordinated terrorist attacks in the United States had become a reality, and the need for a unified, practiced, and tested federal, state, local, international, and private sector incident management capacity has become abundantly clear.
Over the past 22 months, the T-2 exercise process has borne witness to extraordinary impacts, changes, and improvements to our national terrorism preparedness infrastructure. It is a tribute to the planning agility and durability of the more than 300 federal, state, local, and Canadian T-2 exercise planners that the exercise process has the elasticity to remain focused on and on course in the face of such dynamics as the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and the creation of the new department, and, most importantly, T-2 has proceeded concurrent with the nation's ongoing war on terrorism, and with the great battlefield victories of our armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Under the leadership of Secretary Ridge and the Department of Homeland Security, the T-2 process contributes to the war on terrorism here at home by providing a catalyzing exercise architecture, collaboratively crafted by homeland security experts from the federal, state, and local governments through which a process of continuous learning and intergovernmental homeland security preparedness improvement can occur.
T-2 design was based on more than 500 exercise objectives submitted by more than 100 participating federal, state, and local and Canadian agencies. From these objectives, United States and Canadian homeland security professionals developed a fictional, but realistic, 200-page scenario to create the conditions under which these exercise objectives could be accomplished.
Not knowing when or whether terrorist attacks would occur during the T-2 process, exercise planners determined early on that the process should be designed, not only to test and evaluate our preparedness, but to use the process to strengthen national preparedness as quickly as possible.
To that end, a T-2 scenario was used as the basis for a series of six building block seminar exercises conducted in host venues or with significant host venue participation to explore what needed to be done in order to be as prepared as possible, as soon as possible, to mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks, whether they were real or whether the were T-2 scenario-driven.
Federal, state, and local and Canadian agencies were able to bank the learning from these seminars and take positive steps necessary to improve their preparedness for refinement of their homeland security operational plans and procedures.
The exercise begins with an intelligence community assessment that an international terrorist organization has been planning attacks in several U.S. cities. On Monday, May 12th, the terrorist detonate an RDD in Seattle, which leads to a federal, state, and local response.
Unbeknownst to the homeland security community at that time, two days earlier the same terrorist organization executed an aerosolized pneumonic plague attack in several locations in Chicago.
While the Seattle response unfolds into Tuesday, May 13th, concerns begin to rise about an inordinate amount of patients with flu-like symptoms presenting at Chicago area hospitals. The exercise culminates late Thursday or early Friday in Chicago, with the FBI interrupting and neutralizing the adversary.
Here in the National Capital Region, on Monday, May 12th, officials from Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, will leverage and downlink information from T-2 and VNN as inputs to conduct their daylong command post exercise to test and evaluate communications between and among federal, state, local emergency operation centers in the national Capital Region.
As Secretary Ridge said, none of us expect that the nation's response over the five days of the exercise will be perfect. As he articulated, homeland security is complex, extremely challenging, with many moving parts.
Shortcomings will be found, preparedness planning gaps will emerge, but we will learn from what happens, and we will be stronger and better prepared nationally and internationally from the results.
Thank you. Mr. Secretary?
SECRETARY RIDGE: Finally, I think it's important to publicly recognize and thank our partners, out state partners, the cities of Chicago and Seattle, and the states of Illinois and Washington. After the Top Off 1 exercise they volunteered to participate in this process, and we're grateful for their participation.
They've been involved in the planning and exercising, and they're also involved in the public effort today and tomorrow and throughout the balance of the week to make sure that everyone in these communities and in their states understands this is a test, this is a simulation, this is an exercise. We can't underscore that enough. But it's an exercise we think will have permanent benefit to not only those communities, but to our national capacity to respond to a terrorist attack.
All of us will be available to respond to any questions you might have. Sir?
QUESTION: We learned more about SARS than we needed to know. What can you tell us about how a pneumonic plague would be visited upon Chicago? And in Seattle, how much can you tell us about the plan when you drop that dirty bomb at the Pike Place Market or a cargo container at the port or -- what kind of thing is being planned?
SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, I think some of these details will be known through the process -- become known during the unfolding of events. I think the -- all you need to know right now -- all we know basically now is that there is an aerosolized use of biological material in Chicago. I'm not sure that the plan identifies specifically where, but I'll let Ted respond to those two questions.
Ted?
MR. MACKLIN: Yes, sir. As far as the specific details of the actual weaponeering and adversary actions employing the aerosolized pneumonic plague, we're holding that fairly close so that we don't tip off the responders at this particular point.
That is part of the exercise free play, is to determine epidemiologically exactly how the process is -- how the adversaries perpetrated the attacks and -- so at this particular point we want to play that out as part of the exercise.
As that process plays out, we'll be reporting to you daily as to elements that have occurred as the exercise unfolds.
SECRETARY RIDGE: As you can well imagine, if we knew precisely at the outset the source of the release, our ability to respond to it would be dramatically different.
Yes?
QUESTION: Secretary Ridge, there's no role-playing here, right? Tell us what you'll be doing. Will you be at your command center, telling people what to do? And is there anyone playing the role of the President or --
SECRETARY RIDGE: Yes. There will be someone that will be standing in for the President, the chief of staff. I think somebody's standing in for Ari, the press people.
Again, this is to -- there is a lot of role-playing here, but based on a hypothetical. I mean, we will be trying to create as many decision points in the scenario as we possibly can during the five-day period.
We just had a very interesting exercise that lasted two-and-a-half hours just about an hour ago, where quite a few members of the President's cabinet, the principals themselves were there, as well as these representatives from the states and the cities -- just a broad overview of some of the questions that might come up in a scenario like this. And, obviously, part of the challenge is to de-conflict different approaches, different opinions, so that action can be taken.
So there's a lot of role-playing, but I'll be playing myself.
Yes?
QUESTION: How much of the information do first responders have currently about what's expected and what scenarios that they're going to go through? Is it -- how much of it is going to be a surprise? And if it's not going to be a surprise, then what's the point of the exercise?
SECRETARY RIDGE: I will let again, Ted, who's been involved in the planning with people at the state and local level now for nearly two years --
We'll never be able to have a -- I mean, I don't see the scenario where we don't alert the community and the first responders to the fact that we're going to have a test. But beyond that, in identifying the nature of the test, I'll let Ted tell you what specific information they received.
MR. MACKLIN: As I said in my opening remarks, we had to strike a balance between recognizing that the world in which we live over the last 22 months was extremely dynamic, with worldwide exigencies occurring, which caused us to try to strike a balance between banking the learning, meaning sharing part of the scenario with the participating venues along the way so that in case we never got to this point, this full-scale exercise point, on next Monday, May 12th, we would have achieved some progress in better preparing the nation.
We have not shared the scenario specifically with all first responders who will be participating in the exercise, to answer your question directly. They are aware, certainly, that there will be a pneumonic plague attack in the city of Chicago next week, and there will be an RDD blast. The specifics associates with that, as I said earlier, they are not aware of at this point.
The associate stimuli, the injects, the master scenario events list is the technical term we use, that is being held very close to the vest, if you will, to ensure that the responders themselves don't know the specifics of the characteristics, for example, of the RDD or the characteristics of the employment by the adversaries of pneumonic plague.
So we believe we've achieved that balance between sharing enough of the information to ensure that the host venues are as prepared as they can be, but also without creating a process by which we're just simply demonstrating that we can do something that we're already well aware of.
SECRETARY RIDGE: I've asked the mayor to just talk a little bit from his perspective, what he knows and try to limit it to that, and why he feels it's an appropriate limitation on his first responder team.
MAYOR NICKELS: You bet. The information that you've heard today has been shared with us, and so we know when something is going to happen, and we know, in general terms, what it is. We also know there will be surprises thrown at us during the exercise.
The session this morning that Secretary Ridge mentioned was very helpful, I think, both ways, for the federal cabinet officials to hear from a local official what I would be thinking in such a scenario, how I would be proceeding, and for me to hear from them what resources and asset might be available.
At the local level, we've had similar sessions, where the County Executive, Ron Sims, King County Executive, and Governor Loch and his people, and I have been able to sit down and walk through, "Okay, what would we do? How would we communicate? What is it that we would need to be working together on?"
So there's already been value out of this, and we expect next week to be tested to and probably beyond our limits to see where we have weaknesses that we need to work on.
SECRETARY RIDGE: Yes?
QUESTION: Can you say how many hospitals will be participating in the drill and what role they will play?
SECRETARY RIDGE: My recollection, there's in excess of 70, and, again, you can well imagine the wide range of challenged that they'd have in response to both radiological as well as a biological attack.
Ted, do you want to comment?
MR. MACKLIN: We have -- 66 hospitals, I believe, play in the Chicago area, and another ten hospitals playing in the Seattle metropolitan area, a total of 76 hospitals, at least, at this point.
Some of those hospitals will certainly entertain role-playing victims; others will entertain paper-driven virtual victims that will be inserted into their daily processes.
QUESTION: One more question. The briefings that we get while this is being played, are they going to be action reports? Are you going to be telling us as things unfold what you're discovering about your response capabilities, or are they in a way part of a play-acting scenario?
And the second part of the question, intelligence. Is there an intelligence aspect to this? Are the agencies getting information? Are they going to be trying to find clues within that to determine who your terrorist organization is? Are you testing their ability to share information and communicate information?
SECRETARY RIDGE: Yes. First of all, the daily briefings you will get will be basically the unfolding of events and how the communities and the levels of government have responded to the events.
I'm sure that subsequent to Top Off 2 you will also want us to talk to you publicly about lessons learned, be they good or bad, and you can very well expect a report card. That's the reason we're running the test, we understand.
But during the course of the week, the daily briefings you receive will be basically as if the scenario were playing out in real-time and show you and explain to you how things are evolving.
Yes, the intelligence community will be very much involved in this process. Again, we are linked up in not only -- remember, there's a Canadian counterpart to this, so we'll be dealing with both domestic and foreign intelligence, and some of the decision points that -- particularly at the federal level, will depend on the intelligence scenario as it plays out.
Again, to date, some of that information is known to us, but I suspect in that area as well, there will be a few pieces of information that require us to potentially adjust our thinking.
And it will be a test of our ability to share within the federal government, as well as down to the state and local communities as well.
Sir?
QUESTION: Can you go into greater detail about steps that are being taken to prevent a "War of the Worlds" type public reaction once this gets underway?
SECRETARY RIDGE: Well, first of all, we're discouraging people such as yourself from using that expression. That's a good place to start.
(Laughter.)
The mayors and the governors have both had their own public relations efforts that they're going to undertake today and tomorrow. Several elected officials are going to take out full page ads in the dailies and the community newspapers.
And, again, we'll be working very close in coordination with the state and locals to remind people on a daily basis up to and through the exercise that this is a test, this is an exercise. And you could be of great assistance in that regard as well if you would reiterate that message over and over again.
Yes, ma'am?
QUESTION: How did you choose the two types of attacks, the dirty bomb and the plague?
SECRETARY RIDGE: Pardon me?
QUESTION: How did you choose the two types of attacks, the dirty bomb and the plague?
SECRETARY RIDGE: I'm going to let Ted go into the process. But there actually were dozens and dozens of counter-terrorism experts, emergency management experts, men and women who go about the business of dealing with the possibility of this kind of attack every day, and I'll let him explain the decision as to why they chose these two.
MR. MACKLIN: As the Secretary said, the process involved a number of subject matter experts, federal, state, local, international, and private sector experts, getting together in what we call in exercise parlance a concept development conference.
At that conference we receive inputs from those agencies as to what they think they would like to conceptually undertake, whether it would be a chem, a bio, a rad, a nuclear high explosive attack.
In this particular case, the consensus was that we should explore further learning lessons from the Top Off 2000 exercise about the fragility of the public health system at that time and the response to a bio-terrorism event being more -- more difficult, have many more nuances than, say, perhaps, a chemical attack might have.
So from that perspective, we centered on a bio-terrorism attack, and we wanted to build on our lessons from the Denver, Colorado, experience in Top Off 2000, where we also postulated a pneumonic plague attack in the front range of Colorado centered in Denver.
And in terms of the radiological dispersal device, it was a reasonable undertaking by folks responding to some of the emerging threats that we are seeing from the media in the real world about some of the threats that the adversaries -- that we're finding from the adversaries in the caves of Afghanistan. It was a logical choice to select those two elements.
SECRETARY RIDGE: Thanks. I'm sorry we couldn't get you up there to answer a couple questions.
This page was last reviewed/modified on 05/05/03 00:00:00.
