After the anthrax attack on the capital in 2001, HHS invested $3.5 million to convert an old conference room into a high-tech emergency-operations center. Other federal agencies are now copying it. The center has 11.5 miles of electric wire, 20 terabytes of computer memory (one terabyte has 4,000 times the memory of average PC) and a separate air-filtering system in case HHS itself ever becomes a target of biological or chemical weapons. “I think you’ll be very comfortable with how fast we can respond,” said HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson when I invited myself on a tour after a roundtable he held with journalists Tuesday.
In its first six months, Thompson’s center has seen mostly practice runs. The orange plume that was up on one large screen while I was there was modeling what would happen if a tanker full of chlorine were dumped in D.C. The computer map (they say they have them for every city and town in the nation and a few outside the country) purported to plot every hospital, fire station, nuclear reactor, etc. With a click, the screen told us that five hospitals were rendered inoperable because of the chlorine. Another click showed the details for each of the hospitals, like D.C.’s Suburban Hospital, which the computer told us has 232 beds.
A different screen showed a map of the Cajun Capital. In this model, a barge had just collided into New Orleans port and sent some kind of particle agent wafting through downtown. The center’s staff meteorologist and others were trying to chart the microclimate for New Orleans this time of year, so they could predict how far the particles would spread. If it had been a real emergency, the center’s staff could have tuned four plasma screens to local TV stations. The center is like the ultimate satellite dish; it gets 4,000 local channels. “We can see what people are being told by the local media, maybe what’s causing panic,” explains the center’s director, Dean Ross, who has a degree in broadcast engineering and who describes his work as building “algorithms of response.”
Meanwhile, the center’s most useful addition: better communications. “The No. 1 cause of responder fatalities is poor communication,” Ross explains. During 9-11 at the Pentagon, many of the emergency workers were on different radio frequencies and couldn’t even talk with each other, let alone coordinate. The center has created a “robust radio system”–a common channel for emergency information in the event of another catastrophe.
The channels of communication on SARS open every morning at 10:15 a.m. That’s when health officials, often including Thompson himself, gather in the slick technological hub for a videoconference on the disease. Thompson can talk directly to doctors at the Center for Disease Control or, as he did recently, to Chinese health officials about their progress. Computer charts track the spread of SARS both here and abroad. The latest statistics show 299 “suspected” and 66 “probable” SARS cases in the United States. Worldwide there are 8,384 cases, mostly concentrated in Asia, with the exception of Japan, where there are no reported cases. Ross theorizes that the Japanese consider it “rude” to cough on people and already wear protective masks in public if they are ill. The visual charts help the center–where the staffing goes up and down with the alert status–see possible epidemiological connections and political solutions.
A large ticker above the plasma screens reads THREAT LEVEL: ELEVATED. Just getting a quick glimpse at all these possible threats elevates my blood pressure.
