Security Choices
The Washington area should focus preparedness efforts on communications and hospitals.
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THE DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security announced this week that the Washington area will receive $62 million in urban area grants to upgrade security this year. This is $15 million more than last year's inadequate sum, but still well below the $140 million requested. So area leaders face a challenge in deciding how to spend the money.
In past years, grants were spread too thinly, funding too many projects that did not produce impressive results. Local officials promise that this year the money will go to a few top priorities. That's encouraging: This DHS program has pumped nearly $280 million into the Washington area since fiscal 2003, and it's far from clear that the region is more than a quarter-billion dollars safer. Indeed, a report from the watchdog Trust for America's Health released last year ranked the District and Maryland's preparedness for a major health crisis close to the lowest in the country.
On the top of the list of local funding priorities, and rightly so, is improving communications among first responders and leaders across all of the region's jurisdictions, achieving "interoperability" among authorities in the case of a major emergency. Grant money has already gone to purchasing interoperable radios, but the plans are more ambitious, including a fiber-optic communications network and "fusion centers" where local authorities can get federal intelligence data securely and coordinate emergency response. If local officials can build this infrastructure and prepare to use it properly in an emergency, response times will be shorter, evacuations more smooth and panic less pronounced. Fusion centers and data sharing might even be useful in preventing crises.
Though this year's request included other worthwhile proposals, funding limitations will mean cuts for some of them. But officials should not scrimp on the effort to increase hospitals' capacity to deal with an event causing mass casualties, such as a disease outbreak or a large explosion.
