Collaborative Approaches to Threats Old and New

In an age of international and domestic terror, fire service and law enforcement representatives along with elected officials and technology researchers across the country are working collaboratively to find ways to enhance their response capabilities and better secure their emergency scenes.

As we prepare to respond to the pressing issues facing the fire service today, it’s almost impossible to remember our relative innocence of 15 years ago, mere months before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building brought the threat of terrorism home with a vengeance. Although just three years previously, six people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded in Osama bin Laden’s earlier attempt on the World Trade Center, and seven years before that members of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon committed the first domestic bioterrorist attack, it took Oklahoma City and the days and years that followed, culminating on 9/11, to make us truly understand that we had experienced a revolutionary change and would thereafter be living in and responding to an age of terrorism.

Ted Kaczynski’s earliest foray on the grounds of the University of Illinois in Chicago back in 1978 and his many other improvised explosive devices that led to his eventual Montana arrest as the Unabomber, just days before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’ truck bomb 1,400 miles away killed 168 men, women, and children in Oklahoma, barely registered as a blip on the national fire service radar. Because his attacks were spread over several decades and his victims were separated by thousands of miles, and since those communication technologies we now take for granted that allow local fire and law enforcement agencies to share data had not yet emerged, first responders took a traditionally bifurcated approach to the separate police and fire threats posed by Kaczynski and his kind. Today, first responders can no longer accept such a compartmentalized approach, and the aphorism citing “two hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress” cannot continue, as the threats we’ve faced in recent history and those looming on the horizon require—even demand—that we change the way we do business.