WASHINGTON (KRT) — Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge on Tuesday unveiled a new five-color terrorist attack alert system, but it will be up to local officials to decide what people should do during periods of higher alerts.
The terrorist alarm system, which can focus on targeted states, cities or even industries, replaces an unpopular and undifferentiated system that has been used almost incessantly since Sept. 11. Experts say those alerts were too vague and never told people what to do.
Attorney General John Ashcroft will issue the new alerts, as he did most of the old ones. Some disaster experts, who disliked the old system, approve of the new one.
“We’ve taken a step out of chaos and toward organization,” said Randall Duncan, the emergency management director for Sedgwick County, Kan.
For now, America is on yellow “elevated” alert, the middle level of the five, signifying “a significant risk of terrorist attacks,” Ridge said. He said that level would persist “for the foreseeable future.”
The highest level of alert in the new system is red, which is considered “severe”; it is followed in descending order of risk by orange for “high,” yellow for “elevated,” blue for “guarded” and green for “low.”
Response to a red alert would be similar to Sept. 11. It would entail closing public and government buildings, shutting down public transportation and possible establishing curfews, officials said.
Ridge, in a briefing in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, said he hoped threats would recede to green someday, “but I think it’s years away.”
The new terror alert system, Ridge said, leaves a big question: “What do we do to prepare?”
That’s up to the cities and towns, he continued. “There is no prescription we can write out and give to our communities,” Ridge said. But he said cities and states that want federal aid for homeland-security measures would have to submit preparedness plans to Washington to get the money.
Dennis Mileti, co-director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, called the new alarm system “a fantastic first step.” Local preparation, he said, is “the other 90 percent.”
President Bush issued the new alarm system as Homeland Security Order No. 3. It takes effect immediately in federal settings, but must go through a 45-day public comment period and then a 90-day review before being adopted as the nation’s system.
How these alerts will be communicated to people remains to be seen, Ridge said.
© 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune
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