Bomb Squads Are Left Lacking

The upgrade "is extremely important. That's underscored by the recent events in the United Kingdom," said Robert P. Crouch, the top Virginia homeland security official, who manages the national capital area grant along with his Maryland and D.C. counterparts.

The foiled U.K. plot involved two cars in London rigged with propane canisters and nails, plus a subsequent attack on an airport terminal in Glasgow, Scotland.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have poured resources into preventing an attack via a weapon of mass destruction. Al-Qaeda and its followers have instead turned to simultaneous homemade bombs in places including Spain, England and Morocco.

After a quadruple bombing on the London transit system July 7, 2005, bomb-squad commanders in the D.C. area "asked some hard questions" about how they would cope with such attacks, said Pat Race, a bomb technician with the FBI's Washington field office.

The answer: Not as well as they'd like. The squads began pulling together a list of what they lacked, in consultation with the FBI.

"Some needed bomb suits. Some needed more diagnostic equipment. Some might have needed robotic equipment," Brower said. The squads, he said, had "significant equipment operational needs."

The $8 million upgrade was part of the region's Homeland Security grant application last year. But it was shelved after the award came in far lower than expected, at $46 million. Local officials protested at a congressional hearing, warning that the bomb squads had immediate equipment needs.

Edward D. Reiskin, the District's former deputy mayor for public safety, said officials decided to postpone the bomb-squad plan because "we do have pretty good capacity. Like everything else, it's not at the level we'd like it."

The local bomb squads have received hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment from state or local governments in recent years, much of it stemming from other federal grants, officials said.

But new equipment is expensive, with bomb suits costing more than $20,000 each, officials said. In addition, Sharkey said, "technical advances have been just drastic" in recent years, prompting the desire for better gear.

FEMA has no requirements on which cities need to have a Type 1 bomb squad; the classification is simply to help first responders identify who has what resources, said the agency's spokesman.

Schwartz said local commanders would like all the region's squads to be at Type 1, because they frequently work together. And although terrorists might be most likely to strike national icons in the District, the suburbs are home to U.S. intelligence, military and other government facilities as well as several airports, officials note.

Just last year, two U.S. citizens were charged in Atlanta with plotting attacks against targets including a fuel storage depot off Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia.

"We're listed as a target-rich environment, as a region," Brower said. "Everybody's got something that could become a sensitive target."