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DUCT TAPE’S PROTECTION AGAINST
CHEMICAL ATTACK
By Sara Clark
Washington is looking to exercise a boundary between safety and silly, when Mother Nature has forced the northeast to dig into their emergency kits for survival.
The attempts to reiterate the seriousness of the government’s proposal to stock up on water, food, a battery-powered radio, an extra set of car keys, and cash, have been answered with negative jokes. Specifically targeted has been the suggestion to buy duct tape in case of a chemical attack.
Attacks included a pun by the wife of White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels, who said, this year’s Valentine’s Day slogan should be, “Say it with duct tape.”
Daniels said that even he hadn’t dashed to the store to pick up the duct tape, but merely took his wife’s suggestion into matter and sent her a bouquet wrapped in the tape.
“It was some kind of combo arrangement, I don’t know much about flowers,” Daniels said. “But I told them I wanted duct tape on the stems and wrapped around them in some kind of artistic way. I think they kind of got into it.”
White House officials are not the only voices that ridicule the idea. People who live and work in the city have thrown their opinions around generously. Sean Condon, a licensing agent at EMI records, travels daily to his office located in the city.
“I think some of the precautions are a little ridiculous and bring more fear to the people’s minds,” Condon said. “But even if there isn’t a chemical attack, you can still use the duct tape around the house.”
Condon proposed that the increased security around the city made him feel somewhat safer, but there could be more realistic measures taken. He would like to see more of the security in his daily life.
“I take the subway every day. I think they should have cops there, they just have them in Penn Station,” Condon said. “They should be on the train, I feel people would have a sense of security in that.”
For everyone in the city, the high alert means more traffic stops, police officers guarding official buildings, and air national guard troops patrolling the air.
The Air National Guard is not only flying planes over New York City on a daily basis, but they have a specialized team prepared to analyze any gases released in the air. ANG members from all different aspects have taken a role in the prevention.
“There is a Civil Support Team that is a 22-person team specially trained to deal with Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear High Explosives and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Air National Guard Assistant to Air Combat Command Judge Advocate General John Clark said. “Prior to September 11, we had 14 teams. Now there are 27 throughout the country.”
The Air National Guard has stepped down most of it’s ground patrolling and is concentrating mostly on the resolution to such a chemical attack.
“We’ve handed most of the patrolling back to the NYPD,” Clark said. “We didn’t buy duct tape either.”
For the NYPD, increased security means additional hours, extra days of work, and new types of jobs. The men are more than willing to put in the time and effort to learn new search techniques, but feel that some of the precautions the government called for are absurd.
“Our job is to protect the community and I think we are doing that as best we can,” NYPD officer Mike Granshaw said. “We are prepared to do what the president asks of us, but the reaction to the proposal to buy the duct tape should have been considered before the public was advised.”
Elsewhere around the city, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the advice of duct tape “preposterous.”
“You just cannot stop and let the terrorists win and go into a room and duct tape the doors and windows,” Bloomberg said.
President Bush has not taken these comments lightly, and has tried to keep them on the down low among the Republican Party. But his comments have made the president more aware of the response he will likely get from citizens, and in return the president has responded by saying that they are only working off of little information that is somewhat vague, and are just taking extra precautions.
Ed Gillespie, a Republican strategist, hopes that the people understand they need to be ready for whatever is to come.
“In Israel, when they talk about an alert level, people have a sense of how to respond,” Gillespie said. “In the U.S., we’re not conditioned to that at this point.”
Some say that a point has come to where the U.S. resembles Iraq, in that there is a constant fear of attack and armed patrolmen ready to take fire at any given notice.
“I came to the conclusion after 9/11 that we, in a way, are all Israeli’s now,” said one White House staff member. “I think that because we’re sniffed and prodded and see guys walking around with guns, we’re used to it more than most people. But there is an anxiety, like there is with all Americans. There are brief moments, when you’ll be walking across the northwest driveway and you’ll hear some commotion or you’ll hear a siren or a plane and you’ll look up and your mind will think about the worst-case scenario for a second. And then you’ll come back.”
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