Ralph Trussell is the Lone Ranger of Meigs County, the only officer left in the old red brick sheriff’s office that’s open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to noon.
Among the first responders who would be called if there were a terrorist attack against four nearby Ohio River power plants and two dams, the staff of 14 deputies at the Meigs County Sheriff’s Office was eliminated three months ago because of budget trouble.
A dozen black cruisers with yellow stripes sit idle behind the jail, gathering cobwebs until the new budget year begins in December. If you’re really in a fix after hours, you can call Trussell at home or on his cell phone.
“It’s a losing battle,” Trussell said.
Two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, state and local budget cuts have eaten into police and fire protection across the Midwest and around the country.
Even as the federal government has invested billions of dollars to create an enormous new bureaucracy–the Homeland Security Department–aimed at protecting the nation against terrorism and responding to its aftermath, local governments have been squeezed by state budget cuts and the lackluster economy. That has hobbled their efforts as the first line of defense against terrorists as well as first responders.
Are Americans safer now than they were two years ago? The answer is an unsatisfying “It depends.”
Countermeasures taken since the 2001 attacks–improved security at airports and aboard planes, tightened border controls and sharper terrorism and immigration laws–have to some degree raised obstacles for terrorists.
And the Homeland Security Department has brought much-needed and long-absent coherence to efforts to defend against terrorism and prepare for a post-attack response.
But the nation still has numerous vulnerabilities.
The extent of cuts in police and fire services varies from state to state, and some have avoided resorting to layoffs. But local government cuts affect at least 24 states, and the financial strains are severe, as spelled out in an August report from the National League of Cities. The report said state disbursements to cities were cut this year by $2.3 billion, or 9.2 percent. Those reductions marked the first cut in aid to cities in more than a decade, the report said.
Six fire stations have been shuttered in New York City. Firefighters have been laid off in Minneapolis. Metal detectors at the Missouri Capitol building in Jefferson City have been removed. Other sheriff’s offices in Ohio are struggling from the effects of layoffs.
In nearby Monroe County, the sheriff recently resigned after nearly one-third of his deputies were laid off. The acting sheriff, Deputy Tim Price, said his office will run out of money Oct. 1. Price said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
`Nothing has changed’
“As the states are in crisis, they take the dollars that normally go to counties, forcing us to either raise taxes or cut services,” said Karen Miller, a county commissioner from Boone County, Mo., and president of the National Association of Counties.
“I find it very frustrating that after 9/11, many states don’t have better emergency plans than they had before 9/11,” she said. “From my perspective, nothing has changed.”
A recent study on emergency preparedness from the Council on Foreign Relations warned that the U.S. “remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil.”
“The only thing I’m doing is answering the most serious calls,” said Trussell, the Meigs County sheriff, who was preparing Monday to transport a sex offender to a prison two hours away. His absence meant there would be no sheriff’s presence in this Appalachian foothill county for at least four hours.
Besides the lack of resources for officials such as Trussell, there’s the nation’s very nature to contend with.
As an open society that is unlikely to change in that fundamental respect, the U.S. always is going to present terrorists with a variety of soft targets. Such openness, and the sheer number of potential targets, means it’s impossible to defend every one.
But much of the vulnerability is due to bureaucratic and corporate inertia that has made security officials slow to close some of the most widely known gaps.
For instance, while airline passengers are screened, most of the cargo that is placed in the spaces under the passenger cabins is not, raising concerns that terrorists could destroy aircraft with on-board bombs.
Many major airports have such porous perimeter security that runways and other sensitive areas are easily reached by some. In August, three young men whose small boat went astray came ashore at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, wandering its runways until they happened upon airport police and asked for directions.
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Meanwhile, experts say chemical plants remain woefully underprotected against terrorism. A successful attack could cause a toxic release endangering perhaps tens of thousands of people.
Furthermore, the nation remains susceptible to biological weapons, experts say, with local and state health departments too poorly funded and staffed to handle a significant attack.
To some extent, the nation is more secure because authorities are on guard for another attack.
“We are safer because we are more aware of the nature of the threat, so people are more vigilant,” said Randy Larsen, a homeland-security expert who has briefed senior Bush administration officials.
It was such vigilance in the wake of Sept. 11, Larsen said, that likely led an alert doctor to diagnose anthrax poisoning in a Florida man who became the first to die in 2001 from exposure to the bacteria, which was sent through the mail.
“Our medical community today is better-educated, better-trained and more on alert,” Larsen said. “That’s everyone from emergency-room technicians and physicians to laboratory people. So in that regard, we’re far better prepared.”
In a recent speech, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge struck a similar note.
“We can never guarantee that we are free from the possibility of terrorist attack, but we can say this: We are more secure and better prepared than we were two years ago,” Ridge said. “Each and every single day we rise to a new level of readiness and response, now the highest level of protection this nation has ever known.”
The nation’s first homeland security secretary cited improved sharing of information between federal agencies, as well as between federal and state and local officials. His agency is responsible for the color-coded terrorism threat warning system.
Ridge cited other efforts: $4billion in spending on equipment and training for local and state police, fire and other emergency responders; the stockpiling of antibiotics and vaccines that could be used against diseases such as smallpox; the installation of sensors around the country that can detect biological and chemical agents; the tightening of air travel; and the hiring of additional inspectors and Border Patrol agents.
War on terror advancing
Ridge and other homeland-security experts add that the nation is safer because of substantial progress in the war on terrorism. Significant numbers of Al Qaeda terrorist group leaders have been killed or captured through the Afghan war or the efforts of allied governments such as Pakistan and Indonesia, while thousands of foot soldiers have been arrested.
“I can tell you that, surely, their abilities have been degraded significantly,” said Larry Mefford, the FBI’s new chief of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.
“But they are still a very dangerous opponent and adversary, and we have to have our guard up,” he said.
Despite all the progress, the nation’s guard is not up as high as it should be, many observers say. Security at ports, for instance, is not comprehensive enough to assure that a weapon of mass destruction could not be smuggled into the country in one of the 8 million cargo containers that enter U.S. ports.
“If a nuclear device is available or can be constructed and it’s brought into the U.S., it’s going to get in through a container, God forbid,” said Hank Chase, director of homeland security at ITS Corp., who during his Navy career was responsible for security at Navy and Marine bases. “So we have a ways to go there.”
Across the nation, municipal governments also are grappling with how to cope–and pay for–new security requirements.
Some counties have responded to state budget cuts by raising taxes. Missouri’s Boone County enacted a 0.125 percent hike in the sales tax to help pay for law enforcement. In northeast Ohio, Stark County approved a tax increase that enabled the sheriff’s office to bring back laid off deputies.
But Meigs County voters soundly rejected a tax-hike proposal last year, helping to create the budget crisis. County commissioners charge that Trussell is guilty of mismanaging the sheriff’s office budget, a claim he denies.
Commissioner Mick Davenport said the combination of declining tax revenues, state cuts and the closing of a coal mine–the biggest employer in Meigs County–combined to force big spending cuts.
“There’s no margin anymore, no margin to make a mistake in your budget,” Davenport said. “We cut county budgets by 15 percent, but we only cut the sheriff by 10.”
Heavily forested Meigs County is about 100 miles southeast of Columbus and has a population of 23,000. There are no cities. The largest towns are Middleport, with 2,500, and Pomeroy, with nearly 2,000. Trussell said before the cuts that he and his deputies would patrol the county’s winding roads and regularly monitor activity around the power plants and dams.
“I don’t know who’s doing that now,” he said.