Interesting Bioterrorism Drill
Earlier this month there was a bioterrorism drill in Seattle. Postal carriers delivered dummy packages to “nearly thousands” of people (yes, that’s what the article said; my guess is “nearly a thousand”), testing how the postal system could be used to quickly deliver medications. (Here’s a reaction from a recipient.)
Sure, there are lots of scenarios where this kind of delivery system isn’t good enough, but that’s not the point. In general, I think emergency response is one of the few areas where we need to spend more money. And, in general, I think tests and drills like this are good—how else will we know if the systems will work the way we think they will?
bob • November 27, 2006 2:19 PM
Fire drills (or actually evacuation drills) in office or government buildings would be a good way to make things safer also without inventing whole industries of expensive technology that will be misused.
This reminds me of when they rebuilt the pentagon after 9/11, they put little arrow indicators on the baseboard moulding (kind of like european highways where they have arrows on each distance marker post [every 100m] pointing to the nearest emergency phone so you dont walk in the wrong direction) showing the direction to the nearest exit, in the event that you were crawling around on the floor staying below toxic smoke. This was in response to dead bodies they found suffocated at the ‘wrong’ end of (literally) dead-end hallways.
This would also be an effective way to provide more security at little cost, and should be incorporated into all future buildings.