LEAD FOCUS

According to city officials, New York has long been viewed as one of the world's most vulnerable places to terrorist attack. Authorities are said to have quietly undertaken an ambitious effort to foil any strikes with deadly chemicals or biological material. New York City is reportedly building mobile emergency units, working out deals with regional hospitals for emergency care, negotiating unusual deals with drug companies to make medicines quickly in an emergency and taking steps to stockpile medications.

Officials New York's program is part of a federally supported effort to enhance the nation's defenses against germ and chemical terrorism. In 1997, the federal government began training local officials to deal with such attacks. New York's program, which is two years old and has already spent millions of federal and local dollars and is considered is the nation's most advanced program.

Jerome Hauer, director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management, said, "Obviously, New York is the capital of the world and as such it's always viewed as the city that faces the greatest threat. While there is no known, immediate threat, we would be irresponsible if we did not plan for one, even though the likelihood of such an attack is small. The impact of a germ or chemical weapons attack would be devastating."

Nationally, the concern about biological and chemical attacks stem from intelligence reports and incidents such as a religious cult's assaults on Tokyo with nerve gas in 1995. New York has been the scene of terrorist acts in the past. In 1993, a terrorist bomb planted by Islamic militants exploded under the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring about 1,000.

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney, has been a driving force behind New York's heightened preparations. In April, the city began to monitor patterns of emergency hospitalization so it can more quickly know if an attack with unconventional weapons is underway. Experts say New York plans to have the ventilation system of the crisis center bunker located near the World Trade Center adopt a defensive strategy known as positive pressure. This precaution keeps a gentle breeze blowing outward whenever a door or window is opened, automatically keeping away dangerous biological material or chemicals.

The United States government is sponsoring a series of meetings in which officials from New York and other cities play out what would happen if the city were attacked with biological weapons. From these exercises, federal officials plan to learn lessons which are meant to be applied nationwide.

Pentagon officials supervising the congressional program that last year provided about $100 million to support the training of local officials to cope with unconventional terrorist attacks said that only about a third of the 120 cities that are supposed to receive such training and equipment have received assistance so far. Indianapolis, for one, among the first medium-sized cities to receive training, still has not received any equipment to combat biological or chemical threats.

And while Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Atlanta have set aside state and local funds to bolster such preparedness, about half the states are so short of funds that they and their cities have to rely totally on federal assistance to train "first responders," the state and local police, firemen, doctors and emergency planning officials who would be first on the scene.

New York City officials say they are torn between taking credit for defensive preparations and panicking the public with some of doomsday scenarios that, in recent attack studies and simulations, have easily overwhelmed the city's existing defenses. Experts agree that skillful terrorists could injure or kill thousands if not millions of people, but disagree on the likelihood of successful attacks.

New York has reportedly received numerous threats over the years, which have turned out to be hoaxes. Among the most worrisome, and one of the few discussed publicly, was the discovery in a basement in Queens in March 1997 of a canister marked "sarin," a lethal nerve gas. Though the substance turned out to be harmless, the incident led Giuliani to intensify efforts to protect the city.

Until now, local officials have declined to be specific about New York's preparations, some of the steps being taken and their motivation were recently outlined by a city deputy, William Nagle, at a conference in Washington on biological preparedness that was sponsored by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Nagle said New York had already negotiated memoranda of understanding with several counties surrounding New York to give the city access to their hospitals and medical gear in an emergency and was close to an agreement with at least one drug company to provide "surge" capacity for the city in antibiotics. A list of drugs that may be stockpiled at the city's hospitals was now being drawn up.

Since last September, about 4000 members of the New York's police and fire departments had undergone military instruction on how to deal with biological and chemical attacks.

Nagle, New York's deputy director of emergency planning, said, "Doctors and nurses are all trained to run in and help. If they do that with a bio or chem incident, they're going to lose it."

New York has also spent over $1 million to buy 12 mobile emergency trailers filled with containment vessels of different sizes that can isolate dangerous biological material or chemicals, as well as equipment to respond to an attack. Specifically, it has bought several hundred portable detectors to help identify the exact nature of an infectious strike within as little as ten minutes.

One type of detector is as small as a matchbook; the other, known as an immunoassay, is a boxy gadget that uses an antibody to detect the presence of a dangerous germ. New York is the first city to acquire the latter.

Among the least-known measures are plans to place the new command center near the twin towers of the World Trade Center to positive pressure, an idea being promoted by William Patrick, a leading biological terrorism expert. The $15 million crisis center, city officials point out, is far less elaborate and expensive than one already built in Tokyo, which cost an estimated $190 million.

New York officials disclosed details of the first attempt by New York and federal officials to play out a biological attack. The drill demonstrated the city's vulnerability to terrorist attack. On Wednesday, 15 April, more than 50 scientists, government officials and state and local emergency preparedness teams met in secret on the outskirts of Washington. They were confronted with a chilling scenario: More than 1,000 people in a 15-story office building in midtown Manhattan were attacked by a germ disseminated through the unfiltered air ducts.

According to the script, the spray contained tularemia, a highly infectious germ that causes chills, fever, muscle aches, fatigue, pneumonia-like symptoms and can be fatal. The germs spread quickly throughout the building, whose windows were sealed, as they are in so many modern buildings. Within 15 minutes, virtually the entire building was infected. By Friday, 80 people were ill. Some stayed home the next day; others called their doctors. By Saturday, 450 more were sick; some showed up at hospital emergency rooms. By Sunday another 550 were sick. Only then did alarm spread through New York's medical community.