DHSThe side of Homeland Security you won't see on TV
The way the Department of Homeland Security is often portrayed in popular culture — surveillance and secret agents — leaves out a crucial aspect of its role. It also works on technology to detect attacks as they are happening, and helps federal and local governments prepare for all kinds of disasters, from hurricanes to accidental chemical spills to anthrax attacks. Argonne Laboratory engineers contribute to this effort, helping local and state governments form emergency plans, run drills for a pandemic flu outbreak in the city of Chicago, and analyzed ways to enhance security at plants and factories across the country.
The APS synchronotron at Argonne National Laboratory // Source: nih.gov
Five men got on the Tokyo subway on a March morning in 1995. It was the peak of morning rush hour. They all carried packets of a tremendously toxic nerve agent called sarin. Each rode several stops, then dropped the packets to the floor and punctured them with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Then they quickly got off the train. Sarin was first developed in Nazi-era Germany as a pesticide; it evaporates almost instantly into a gas that seeps into the body through the skin and eyes and interferes with the body’s electrical signaling. Victims die because important muscles, including the lungs, become paralyzed.
Some of the trains rode for miles before anyone stopped them. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Twelve people died in the subways that day, and thousands more were poisoned.
As Japanese authorities tracked down the men, who were members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, other countries around the world looked at the security of their own subways and public transportation. Subways are an attractive target for chemical and biological attacks because they cram a lot of people into small, enclosed spaces, and as they move from stop to stop, they spread the agent quickly. Before Aum Shinrikyo, no independent group had really succeeded in using chemical or biological weapons. The paradigm had shifted a little.
The United States asked the Department of Energy, which had expertise in radiological and chemical sensing, to begin looking into a network of sensors that could detect chemical weapons released in an enclosed space like the subway or a building.
“Each minute that you can shave off the response time saves lives in these kinds of situations,” said Argonne systems engineer Pat Wilkey, who oversees the resulting initiative, called PROTECT, now fully deployed in several major cities.
As Argonne engineers worked on the fledgling system, the United States encountered disaster from another route. After the September 11th attacks, President George W. Bush stepped up funding for projects like PROTECT and consolidated several agencies into the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with protecting the nation from disaster.
But the way the department is often portrayed in popular culture — surveillance and secret agents — leaves out a crucial aspect of its role. It also works on technology to detect attacks as they are happening, like PROTECT, and helps federal and local governments prepare for all kinds of disasters, from hurricanes to accidental chemical spills to anthrax attacks.
