Attack Here
Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more explosive materials, toxic Gases, and deadly petrochemicals than anywhere else in the country—which is why most security experts agree that it’s one of America’s top Targets. So what's the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike?
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There are many such stories showing how easily subverted our shipping systems are. When local emergency committees model terrorist attacks, they often use containers as the means of assault, and there is no one who believes that the present methods of security and screening are even close to being terrorist-proof. “There is virtually no security for what is the primary system to transport global trade,” said U.S. Customs commissioner Robert Bonner in August 2002. “If terrorists used a sea container to conceal a weapon of mass destruction and detonated it on arrival at a port, the impact on the global economy would be devastating.” Coming from the Customs commissioner, that is a frightening statement. While the system has been trimmed and tightened since he made it, there is still a long way to go before anyone can be sure that ships carrying bombs are not steaming up to loading docks in the heart of America’s largest cities.
Which is why I began my hypothetical attack aboard a container ship. But most experts agree that, in an industrial area where explosions are not uncommon, a terrorist strike would likely involve much more than that. “Mischief is not what they are after,” says Peter Ulrich, of RMS Associates, a company that models disasters and terrorist attacks for the insurance industry. “They want to make an impact. We react most strongly to massive destruction and people killed. Sabotaging the New York Stock Exchange would be a pain in the butt, but it would not directly affect most people’s lives. The attack on the World Trade Center was a horrifying, large-scale event that most people can relate to.”
With that in mind, I have constructed a more ambitious attack, one with multiple phases designed to take advantage of the Ship Channel’s many vulnerabilities and to accomplish everything the World Trade Center attack did and more. There is no single authority on this: The event is constructed from histories of industrial accidents, the worst-case scenarios in the RMPs, and five terrorist war games invented by the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center, the Houston Local Emergency Planning Committee, RMS Associates, and Booz Allen Hamilton consultants in partnership with the Conference Board business group. All of this information is public; indeed, it is deliberately so. Right now cities and counties across the country run terrorist-attack scenarios similar to the one that follows on a routine basis.
IN THE MINUTES after the detonation of the container in the hold of the Ocean Princess, the community responds as it usually does in an emergency. Fire, rescue, and EMS teams are dispatched; local TV news crews hustle to the scene. But they will soon learn that the awesome blast is merely a sideshow, not the main event. EMS teams within a mile of the blast quickly discover that the air is full not only of smoke and fire and choking fumes from oil, gas, and various petrochemicals but also of radioactive contamination. That is because the conventional explosives also contained three radioactive isotopes: cobalt 60, cesium 137, and plutonium 238. This is known as a “dirty bomb,” or an RDD—a radiological dispersal device. Materials for such a bomb are all readily obtainable from hospitals, research facilities, industrial and construction sites, and from such common commercial tools as machines that irradiate food products. Its purpose is to scatter low-level radiation over as wide an area as possible. The idea is less to kill—which such low levels can rarely do—than to sow panic.
Which is exactly what it does. News that radiation sensors are going off all over east Houston creates mass hysteria. Soon one million Houstonians are on the move, clogging highways and streets. News of the dirty bomb, coupled with the earlier intelligence that there might be others, effectively shuts down all commerce at all U.S. ports. Nothing moves, in or out. Homeland Security orders every container—on trucks, railcars, or ships—either x-rayed or opened and searched. In other cities there are huge traffic jams as people flee from imagined danger.
In spite of the spreading panic, fire, public health, and EMS crews fight their way bravely to the scene. CIMA is possibly the premier fire-fighting agency in the world. It has fixed leaks and put out all sorts of chemical and oil fires. Even such a large explosion, which now includes sunken ships blocking the channel, is quickly handled. Dirty bombs make this all vastly more complicated. Still, CIMA, the Coast Guard, EMS, and other emergency teams have rehearsed this. They have a plan. They know what sort of protective gear to wear and how to decontaminate victims. They know that the main harm from a dirty bomb comes from the blast itself, not the radiation. But while the enormous fireballs were rising in the channel, a series of explosions in a nearby chlorine plant went initially unnoticed. Members of a terrorist sleeper cell have managed to detonate three 250-ton chlorine storage tanks, causing the tank walls to collapse and almost all of the liquid chlorine to escape within ten minutes. A dense, faintly yellowish gas cloud, denser than one thousand parts per million, kills all of the nearby workers at the plant and moves off on a five-knot northerly breeze toward the city of Deer Park, population 29,000. Everyone in the near vicinity of the plant dies.
Deer Park—which only minutes before has discovered that it is the victim of a radiological attack—now becomes a scene of utter terror and devastation. Chlorine is extremely toxic to humans. It causes violent laryngeal spasms. When it reacts with liquids in the body, it creates hydrochloric acid, which produces an acute burning sensation. As it is inhaled, it spreads hydrochloric acid throughout the upper respiratory system. It also causes pulmonary edema, a condition in which you, in effect, drown in the fluids in your own lungs. Thousands nearest the plant suffocate and die in their homes; workers on the lower floors of buildings die.
The cloud reaches the center of the city of Deer Park, still at a highly toxic density of more than two hundred parts per million. Everywhere, people are convulsing with pulmonary edema. And now the emergency workers are truly overwhelmed, as are hospitals and ERs. Hundreds of thousands of people are being evacuated. Medical teams are treating many with severe breathing problems, and there are nowhere near enough ventilators to handle the worst cases. The cloud is dispersing but still covers ten square miles and is defoliating trees all over south and east Houston. News of the chemical attack, coming on top of news of the radiological attack, has created an exodus of people that has virtually stopped all traffic in Houston. People are leaving their cars and trying to walk out of the city, suffering from nasal or tracheal inflammation and streaming eyes as they go.
Several hours later, winds pick up and disperse most of the chlorine gas, but the damage remains. Rescue workers all across the city treat people with acute chlorine burns and radiation poisoning. By the next morning, the grim totals are being flashed around the world in news broadcasts: More than 10,000 people are dead—some 500 from the bomb blasts and the rest from chlorine poisoning. Thirty-thousand are injured and jamming the makeshift hospitals and ERs that have sprung up all over Harris County. The only good news is that Harris County emergency teams, trained extensively to respond to these sorts of attacks, have been remarkably well organized. Though almost every system is overrun and all ERs overwhelmed, medical teams have managed to treat or decontaminate enormous numbers of victims. This is a direct result of the many rehearsals emergency teams have done since 9/11 for precisely this sort of attack.
In economic terms, the cost will be astronomical. The Dow drops precipitously; gasoline prices skyrocket. Corporate earnings plunge, just as they did after 9/11. In a war game conducted earlier this year in which several dirty bombs were discovered in containers but none actually detonated, Booz Allen Hamilton and the Conference Board estimated the total damages at $58 billion—just from a 22-day paralysis of our ports and border crossings. The costs in this case would be many multiples of that, the strain on insurers far greater. It will take several weeks to open the channel to shipping. It will take months to decontaminate areas in the cities of Houston, Deer Park, La Porte, and Pasadena, both for chlorine and radioactive particles from the bomb.
As for what steps we might take as a nation after this attack or what new demons it might unleash, who knows? For now it is enough to understand that, while such a terrorist assault on the American heartland is wholly fictional, it is also, beyond a doubt, entirely plausible.
With reporting by Kate Getty.
Big Bang Theory
The Houston Ship Channel has seen many disasters, including the explosion of the Chevron Hawaii in 1979. A well-planned terrorist attack would likely have the same goals as did the depredations of 9/11: widespread destruction of property and human life and the sowing of mass fear, panic, and confusion. To those ends, the Houston Ship Channel offers terrorists what war planners call “a target-rich environment.” Here’s how an attack might go down: 1) A huge container ship entering the upper Houston Ship Channel is blown up, and the impact sets off a cascade of violent explosions that include a liquefied petroleum gas tanker and a nearby oil tank farm. Authorities soon discover that the first explosion was also a “dirty bomb,” producing radioactive dust and particles that contaminate the areas near the channel. 2) Workers at a nearby chemical plant who are secretly part of a terrorist sleeper cell detonate three 250-ton chlorine storage tanks. 3) Propelled by a northerly wind, the chlorine plume drifts south, killing thousands.
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