By Wayne Parry, The Associated Press
Newark, N.J. (AP) -- There is no shortage of appealing terrorist targets in New Jersey: sports stadiums that hold 80,000 people, fuel and chemical tanks, and tunnels and bridges that carry tens of thousands of commuters in confined spaces.
Because of this, and because of communications flaws exposed by the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and last summer’s massive northeast blackout, government, law enforcement and transit agencies in New Jersey launched a pilot program Tuesday that is designed to share information more quickly and easily during a disaster or attack.
“New Jersey is in the zone of danger,” said state Attorney General Peter C. Harvey. “That has been the case and will continue to be the case.”
Part of the program involves computer software that enables users to envision how their particular facility might fare during an attack, and suggest ways to protect against it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security hopes to duplicate the program in other areas of the country soon.
The state awarded a $1.3 million contract to Digital Sandbox, a Reston, Va., company that will provide its Site Profiler technology to agencies including Harvey’s office, the state counterterrorism office, the State Police homeland security branch, NJ Transit, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey. Camden and either Morris or Essex county government also will be included in the program.
The money is part of anti-terror funding New Jersey received from the federal government.
The technology that links various agencies with data, audio and video will be online “in the near future,” Harvey said. That technology is not related to the Site Profiler program.
“During a critical event, you would have real-time situational awareness of what’s going on,” said Richard Jacques, senior project manager for the U.S. Homeland Security Department’s Office for Domestic Preparedness. “Regardless of where you are, you would have access to the same information and see the same images. It’s an effort to bring all of the command centers together.”
That’s not something agencies were able to do well during the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jacques said.
He said New Jersey was selected for the pilot program because it had taken a number of steps to beef up its homeland security efforts, including working on a backup communications system that could be used if traditional systems were destroyed and creating one of the first state-level counterterrorism offices.
He also said the state was the first in the nation to implement a two-way radio system linking all its acute-care hospitals.
The Site Profiler software program lets police departments or other government agencies enter information about facilities such as buildings, bridges and tunnels. The information would include how accessible the facility is to the public, how many people work there, how critical the facility is to the area and how access to it is controlled.
The program then compares the information against known threat profiles, such as the possibility of a building with certain physical or geographical properties being attacked, a company spokeswoman said.
The company said the program should be up and running by the end of October.