Edge of Disaster Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

Chapter 1 A BRITTLE NATION The United States has become a brittle superpower. We are the world's economic and cultural 900-pound gorilla and spend more on our military muscle than the rest of the world combined. Yet we increasingly behave like the occupants of a grand old mansion who have given up on investing in its upkeep. We depend on complex infrastructure built by the hard labor, capital, and ingenuity of our forbears, but we seem oblivious to the fact that it is agingand not very gracefully. Bridges are outfitted with the civil engineering equivalent of a diaper. Public works departments construct "temporary" patches for dams that leave those living downstream one major storm away from waking up to a wall of water rolling through their living rooms. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers, and transmission lines that has utility executives holding their breath on every hot day in July or August. It is not just modernity's hardware that is being neglected. Two decades of taxpayer rebellion have stripped away the means for emergency workers to help us when we need them. Today, most city and state public health departments are not adequately funded to manage their routine work. A flu pandemic would completely overwhelm them. A growing number of firehouses have been shuttered in recent years, and firefighters must make do with radios that often are unable to support communications with neighboring departments. In many cities across the country, there are fewer police officers on the streets today than there were in 2001, and those still on the beat have only limited access to the kind of protective equipment that would allow them to operate in a contaminated environment. Emergency room services have been a major casualty of medical care belt-tightening, forcing ambulances to routinely engage in countywide scavenger hunts for a place to bring their patients. Federal agencies such as the Coast Guard operate with a rickety fleet of aged ships and aircraft that routinely break down during patrols. In short, on any given day, our first responders are barely treading water. That means that there is little to no capability to deal with large-scale disasters such as major hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and disease outbreak. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we seem blissfully ignorant of what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. Washington has shown little interest in challenging this national state of complacency. Rather than address the myriad soft targets within the U.S. border, the White House has defined the war on terrorism as something to be managed by actions beyond our shores. The rallying cry of the Bush administration and its allies on Capitol Hill has been "We must fight terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." What this ignores is that terrorists can still come hereand, worse yet, are being made here. When it comes to natural disasters, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue rationalize their passivity by citing deference to governors and mayors and the private sector. With the exception of the nation's capital and military bases, our national infrastructure lies within the jurisdictions of individual states and cities and is largely owned and operated by private entities. And emergency response has traditionally been a local responsibility. The most compelling lesson we should have learned on 9/11 is that our borders are unable to provide an effective barrier against the modern terrorist threat. The al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the attacks on New York and Washington had been residing in the United States. They did not strike us with weapons of mass destruction provided by a rogue state but turned four domestic airliners into their equivalents. The Madrid train attacks in March 2004, theFlynn, Stephen is the author of 'Edge of Disaster Rebuilding a Resilient Nation', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400065516 and ISBN 1400065518.