How law officials are planning for the unfathomable

By NANCY KIMBALL

When terror strikes

The Daily Inter Lake

Hungry Horse Dam was blown up a couple years ago.

Then the Columbia Falls water system was destroyed.

From there, the terrorism only got worse.

Thankfully, the attacks were hypothetical, a what-if exercise to get law-enforcement officials thinking on their feet as emergency-services planners in Helena threw one disaster scenario after another at the Flathead Valley law cadre.

But they made their point.

Detailed prevention and response plans have worked their way through Flathead County police and fire departments, and Sheriff's Office since Sept. 11, 2001.

Drills have been conducted, wild cards thrown in, plans reworked again and again.

"Realistically, you have a disaster and it's never going to go 100 percent as planned. There are too many unpredictable factors in there," Flathead County Sheriff Mike Meehan said. "But this county has a pretty good grasp of what we're going to do."

The sheriff, area fire chiefs and the Office of Emergency Services formed a Community Protection Incident Management Team to set up front-line response if a terrorist attack or other disaster occurred.

They play a juggling act to maintain communications at federal and state levels while keeping a protective watch over isolated homes tucked into every draw and backcountry mountainside.

"As people move to less-accessible places, our job is to be able to respond," said Mike Ferda, assistant chief of Whitefish police.

An uncomfortable reality is that threats, too, can lurk in those draws.

"It doesn't have to be on a national level," Columbia Falls police Chief Dave Perry said about potential terrorists.

In June 2005, a vandal damaged the city's 2-million-gallon concrete water-storage tank at the Cedar Creek Reservoir. If the intruder had succeeded in breaking into it, much of the city's water supply would have been contaminated.

"It can be a single individual," Perry said. "It's still a terrorist. It doesn't have to be from al-Qaida. It can be your local neighbor who is disgruntled over something."

Area LAW-enforcement officials address all levels of threats.

To do that, U.S. Office of Homeland Security money filtered into the county not long after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Meehan said the first infusion of money in Flathead County bought a mobile dispatch center in 2004. It is a trailer filled with radios and other communication equipment as sophisticated as what the county currently operates, but compacted into a unit that can be moved to outlying command sites.

For the past year or two, he said, local Homeland Security money has been geared toward the Northern Tier Interoperability Project.

Spurred by lessons learned from 9/11 when failed communications among government agencies proved disastrous, this project establishes a uniform standard across all levels of law-enforcement and security agencies.

It sets up a cache of radios that are Project 25-compliant - the project establishing standards for wireless communication and response to save lives and control damage.

"It's a system to where we have very good coverage even in buildings," Meehan said. "Right now our portables don't work underground."

The communication backbone, still being finished, crosses the border from the northern tier of U.S. counties into the southern reaches of Canada. While Helena is using its new system, Meehan said Flathead County is nearing a decision on whether to commit to the project.

County commissioners appointed a Local Emergency Planning Committee, the sheriff said, gathering representatives from phone service and natural-gas providers, hospitals, railroad and others.

Among its duties is identifying hazardous chemicals in an attack or other disaster, then passing along information to the public. Flathead County adopted an "all hazards" committee, Meehan said - bearing in mind the absence of major chemical industrial plants in the Flathead, but the very real threat of anhydrous ammonia tanks used on farm fields.

DRILLS PLAY an important part in response plans.

On Sunday, Feb. 25, county SWAT teams worked for four hours at Columbia Falls High School to practice how they would respond to a variety of threatening situations.

Columbia Falls again played host Tuesday, when planners gathered for a Cedar Creek dam failure exercise, running models that showed where and how high the water would reach across the northern edge of Columbia Falls.

Several drills have been conducted at Glacier Park International Airport, taking responders through the paces of terrorist bombings that take out the airport as well as straightforward accidents that bring on plane crashes.

Meehan said Missoula serves as a storehouse for sophisticated bomb technology and explosives trailers, which were brought to the Flathead for Vice President Dick Cheney's visit in November.

Memorandums of understanding lay out mutual-aid agreements among the Sheriff's Office, Border Patrol and U.S. Forest Service if a calamity occurs.

"The bottom line is the county commissioners play a very important part in that decision" on who is called, Meehan said. His office protects people and property; Office of Emergency Services, fire departments, police departments and the Health Department have their areas of responsibility.

The routine cycle of life, too, provides training.

"Fire season each year has been the biggest catalyst for our preparedness," Ferda said. "There's a bigger chance of a forest fire than a terrorist

attack. And we have a lot of trains and tanker trucks roll through town with dangerous loads."

Police deal with lifesaving measures. City utility departments protect infrastructure. At Whitefish's relatively isolated water tower, new surveillance and security measures have been put in place. Central monitoring is being investigated.

"But with a dramatic thing, all you can do is come up with the best plans. You don't know how they're going to respond," Ferda said.

"We need to do what we can do and be sound in our planning. We can't let them rule our lives. We can't let them rule our homes. But we've got to be serious about it."

FLATHEAD COUNTY agencies have a plan for a coordinated response, though all details are not made public.

In addition, Perry said a phone tree to notify the Salvation Army, the United Way and other direct-aid organizations is "pretty effective."

During earthquakes and similar natural disasters, he added, people should plan on taking care of themselves for as much as three days.

"That goes back to Katrina," when hard-hit residents were relying on outside support, Perry said. "We recommend you have a three-day supply of water and food, and even heat. We don't have the capability of supplying that, and I don't think anyone expects that."

In the final analysis, the character of the state's residents themselves may be the Flathead's ace in the hole.

"Montanans can deal with being out of power, electricity and water and things like that better than metropolitan areas," Meehan said.

"Personally," Perry said, "I think Montanans would fare pretty well, because in a lot of ways we're pretty self-sufficient. A lot of times Montanans do it themselves; they're used to living off the land."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com