(Interesting approach to the reality of security outside the walls of DHS....rf)
House Of Cards, Bridge Of Steel Why not do nothing to defend the Golden Gate Bridge? Martha Baer, special to SF Gate Wednesday, March 16, 2005 http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/03/16/ggbridge4.DTL All our carefully considered structural modifications, security precautions and other expert-driven measures aside, the bottom-line question still remains: "How do we keep the Golden Gate Bridge safe from a terror attack?" To which a seemingly end-of-the-road response might be, "How about doing nothing? What if we left the bowed wonder just as it is?" At a time when counterterrorism is a ubiquitous byword and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to spend $40 billion a year to protect public structures, this recommendation may sound preposterous, but doing nothing to safeguard the Golden Gate Bridge is a real option. In fact, a blue-ribbon panel on securing bridges and tunnels says a first round of analysis should look at three alternatives: "mitigation," that is, spending money on retrofitting, guards or other security technologies; "transfer," which is to say shifting responsibility to insurance companies; and "acceptance," which the panel translates as "no action." Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition Inc., easily the most sought-after company in its field, likes the sounds of "acceptance." "Do we want to spend our money on AIDS research, or on hardening buildings?" he asks rhetorically. His answer: the former. Loizeaux is a formidable guy whose paid occupation is to blow up buildings as big as PacBell Park. It's a family thing: his brother, wife, son and three daughters all load explosives as well. Just talking with Loizeaux can make you skittish, as if any moment something might catch fire, because he's so brash and seemingly fearless. "If I were a terrorist," he says, "I'd look at a structure layer by layer. I'd peel it, get down to its Achilles heel." The Loizeaux family company has brought down thousands of structures, including nuclear facilities, oil-drilling platforms, Seattle's Kingdome, the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, the Beirut Hilton and the remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a project domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh started. The company is bidding on the demolition of the to-be-replaced eastern span of the Bay Bridge, and its expertise has been sought out by the U.S. State Department and the military -- and by at least one official (whom Loizeaux won't name) concerned about threats to the Golden Gate Bridge. So, when Loizeaux talks about whether to spend money and time on strengthening San Francisco's gorgeous orange span, he's persuasive. "No matter what man builds," says Loizeaux, "he can take it down." In his view, no security measures will stop terrorists from destroying the span if they want to. "Whenever I'm asked to put on a terrorist's hat," Loizeaux continues, "I say, 'You can't stop me.'" The best any operational or structural efforts will accomplish, he believes, is to discourage an attacker from bothering with your particular target. But that will do little more than send him to his next one. If you make the dam harder to destroy, he'll target the chemical plant; harden the plant, and he'll attack the embassy. "If I were a terrorist," Loizeaux continues, "I'd just bide my time." Loizeaux would much prefer that counterterrorism efforts focus on interdiction or cutting off funding to terrorist groups. "We need to take the fight to them," he says. Although this view might seem imprudent to bridge officials or Marin-based commuters to the City, most engineers wouldn't bat an eye at it. For one thing, they know the huge costs of many protection measures can be wasted. According to Eve Hinman, an expert on blast-resistant design, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent shoring up the base of the World Trade Center buildings following the bombing there in 1993. All that, of course, was rendered useless on 9/11. Engineers also know just how difficult the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge really is. Older structures such as the bridge, completed in 1937, have the advantage of age as well as heft. "Designers of old bridges and buildings were very conservative," Hinman explains. "The less they knew, the more safety they'd build in." (Without computers, Charles Ellis, the bridge's designer, used about 10 books full of handwritten equations to work through the structure's requirements.) She offers an example: "The Empire State Building is much less efficient in terms of usable space than the World Trade Towers were, but it's also more robust." Though it's certainly possible, bringing down a structure so well built and massive would be an unlikely and extraordinary feat. "These bridges are not built of tissue paper," says Hinman. Roupen Donikian, an engineer at San Francisco-based T.Y. Lin, which has worked on seismic retrofitting of the Golden Gate Bridge, has a similar attitude. "I'm not worried about it," Donikian says. "Bringing down a bridge is a very hard thing to do. "I'm more scared of the administration in the White House than anything else," he adds, "and you can quote me on that." All of their arguments are compelling. After all, these experts are intimately acquainted with the bridge's vulnerabilities. But what makes this do-nothing approach unlikely is that it's simply not practical in societal terms. From a broad, national perspective, Loizeaux may be right to question the logic of protecting one site to simply send attackers to an easier target, but, as far as locals are concerned, sending your enemy elsewhere has a lot of appeal. Like all kinds of policy making, decisions about security are political, temporal and local. To make no attempts to better safeguard the Golden Gate Bridge would be to act in a vacuum. Consider the political fallout of doing nothing. No Golden Gate Bridge official, San Francisco supervisor, California state official or Homeland Security Department honcho wants to take the chance of being held accountable for gruesome, "preventable" deaths. Politically, it's far better to make even failed efforts to prevent tragedy than to -- however reasonably -- make no efforts at all. Plus, there's money to be had -- security money, flowing to governments and into the marketplace. Just as funding for earthquake retrofitting has come in great waves since the San Fernando quake in 1971, washing in again after Loma Prieta in '89 and then Northridge in '94, security funds may be available only in short bursts, and no Bay Area leaders want to pass up a chance at the jackpot. In fact, it would be foolhardy to do so. Aside from political ramifications, the funding provides security upgrades that can actually yield real benefits. Although not particularly efficient, those cycles of earthquake funding, over time, have enabled retrofitting efforts as well as education about temblor behavior that add up to real improvements in our ability to survive them. Similarly, over time, counterterrorism measures can deter attackers, reduce the damage of an attack that occurs and strengthen our ability to respond. Structural and operational measures also have ancillary benefits not specific to terrorist threats. More cops at the bridge can provide more safety and response power in situations that involve ordinary visitors. Better lighting is good for everyone, not just for counterterrorism patrols. And more attention to activity on the water means more safety for anyone afloat. Moreover, the very discussions about security funding have benefits of their own. Ask most people involved in infrastructure how their jobs have changed since 9/11, and they'll tell you their professional circles have broadened, that they've found themselves at the table across from people they would never have known before, that they're communicating across old divides. Dennis Mulligan, the Golden Gate Bridge's chief engineer, says he's met military types whose expertise is largely new to him. U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Gordon Loebl says, "Before, it was hard to get the FBI to show up at a meeting; now, they're co-chairing them with us." Across agencies and disciplines, new connections are being forged -- between legislators and scientists, engineers and tourist boards -- and the parties are ultimately forced to sit down in conference rooms and hammer out counterterrorism decisions together. Says Leo Gonnering, an expert in infrastructure security at the prominent New York engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, "In these little sessions, I haven't seen fisticuffs, but I've seen pretty heated arguments." This kind of communication can have huge value among civic cultures that are often surprisingly ignorant of one another. Sharing information can make everyone smarter, especially when the new challenge of security is generating deeper analysis of the bridge itself, of the physical and human forces that define it. Securing the Golden Gate Bridge will always involve money, fear, guesswork and politics. But the great bridge has made it through the mire of competing interests before. As far back as the 1930s, when construction of the bridge was under debate, supporters and employees of the Marin-San Francisco ferry service were battling with the bridge builders over turf, so the players launched a whispering campaign to destroy trust in the bridge. Rumor had it that a few hundred men marching in lockstep across it could bring the bridge down, and that, even more preposterously, the vibrations of a violin played at just the right pitch would cause the whole structure to crumble. The public didn't fall for the violins back then, and, despite warring interests over its very construction, the Golden Gate Bridge still stands as a beacon today: an aesthetic, symbolic, bold and brilliant piece of mathematics. And the odds are that the bridge will keep standing. Discussions about terror threats will continue. Leaders will continue to make decisions based on risk assessments, structural hardening and human resources. And if none of those measures are implemented, or if they fail, and terrorists get up close, they'll still have to contend with the raw might of the thing itself. They'll still have to face down the tremendous power, both corporeal and poetic, of the great bowed wonder. # # # # # Martha Baer most recently co-authored "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" (HarperCollins, 2005) and is a regular contributor to Tango magazine. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
