For the past week, Portland has been in involved in a little Federal Homeland Security exercise called TOPOFF4. You may have heard about it? For the past week, local and federal agencies have been running around like little Chicken Littles, practicing their responses to various simulated attacks. Tuesday, a simulated dirty bomb went off out at Portland International Raceway and the rest of the week I guess was spent dealing with the aftermath of that.
Wednesday, David Douglas High School was involved too, I guess. Anyway, the upshot is that the governor, the mayor, the Oregon AG, and Michael Chertoff have all been flitting from place to place.
For some reason, meetings and conferences seemed to involve a musical chairs set of hotels across the city. Some sort of conference took place at a hotel by the airport yesterday morning and then later that afternoon, the Doubletree at Lloyd Center was going to be involved.
The interesting thing in all this is this snippet from the Oregonian article, ironically titled ‘Massive terror drill may hardly be noticed’, about TOPOFF:
Any chance it will tangle traffic, trigger widespread panic or disrupt life in general?
Not likely, if everything goes as planned. PIR will stand in during the initial phase for the area around the Steel Bridge, which is where the script calls for the radiological bomb to go off. That puts most of the action this morning away from the bustle of downtown. You may hear a few extra sirens during the simulation or see actors covered in mock burns and blood being wheeled into local emergency rooms.
David Douglas High School and many of its students are also participating. But the fictional emergencies should mostly happen in the shadows. But if you do happen to spot emergency responders in gas masks and radiation suits: Don’t panic. It’s just a drill.
So I tell you all of that so I can tell you this. I took the MAX into work yesterday. I left work a bit early, around 3PM, and was looking forward to a nearly empty MAX train. I have found that any time after 4:15 or so, until about 6, the MAX can get packed. It is rush hour after all. It is also important to note that the MAX line runs past the Doubletree hotel and has a Lloyd Center stop.
Yesterday afternoon, bomb-sniffing dogs go apeshit in the parking structure of the hotel.
Just before 1 p.m., as police ran a security sweep before Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s arrival at the DoubleTree Hotel near Lloyd Center, something about a car in the parking garage sent bomb-sniffing dogs into a frenzy.
Within minutes, police had unrolled thousands of feet of crime-scene tape and cordoned off several blocks. They also shut down MAX trains in the area, and alerted people inside the Northeast Portland hotel and surrounding buildings that they could leave — although they wouldn’t be allowed to return until after the emergency passed.
“I can’t tell you we have some kind of terrorist bomb,” said Sgt. Brian Schmautz, a Portland police spokesman, as the city’s bomb squad arrived. But he added, “these highly trained dogs wouldn’t be going berserk without there being something.”
That something turned out to be the cops and soldiers gathered at the hotel for Topoff. It’s likely, police said afterward, that one — or several — of the participants who train with explosives had inadvertently left residue on or in their car.
So we have a false alarm that just completely clusterfucks everyone in that area and everyone traveling through that area for several hours because of residue.
When I got on the train, the driver announces that the Rose Quarter was his last stop before turning around and heading west again. When we get there, three buses are waiting to shuttle us to the 42nd Street Transit Center. The buses travel along the track to 7th, where the track is blocked by a police car. I can see a bunch of police in military style fatigues and a shitload of police tape wrapped around something in the distance. At this point I don’t know it’s because of a bomb scare. I know that Congressman Blumenauer has an office near the shitload of police tape. I figure one of the nutroots who regularly picket his office to get him to impeach Bush finally snapped and was holed up in his office with a month’s supply of granola and Noam Chomsky books on tape, threatening to hold his breath until he turned blue unless Blumenauer wrote that impeachment bill RIGHT THIS MINUTE.
The bus turns right and spends literally 10 minutes working through the backup of cars waiting to get on the 84. Ten minutes after that, the bus pulls into the 42nd street transit center where a west bound train is waiting. Trimet staff tell us that’s actually an east bound train. So we, the crowd of displaced travelers, cram onto the train. It’s just packed. Add three bus loads of people showing up at the same time to the regular traffic and the narrow station platform looks like an ant hill in the aftermath of little Bobby’s vindictive 5-year old foot.
I’m standing in the middle of the train, elbow to elbow with my fellow commuters. I’m trying to read, realizing that holding a thick hardback on the history of the CIA with one hand is kind of a pain in the ass, maybe I should have pulled out the O’Brian trade paperback I have in my bag instead. The train hasn’t left yet because the Trimet people are still working through that communal fog of confusion that seems to fall over people when their daily routine has been shot to hell. More people get on the train. Some people finally actually HEAR what the Trimet guys are saying, these people are on the side of the train furthest from the open doors, figure out we’re on an east-bound train and annoy the rest of us by pushing their way off the train. Not enough by far, the net population of the train continues to grow.
Finally, after ten minutes, the train heads back east. I realize, looking at the incredibly large pores on the face of the Hispanic gentlemen next to me, that this train has 5 stops to go before I can get off, three of which will add more people to the train than remove. By this time, it’s been over an hour since I left the office. Normally, I would be walking to my car in the Park And Ride lot. The train is moving slowly and I hear grinding noises. The irony is thick at this point, but wouldn’t it be special of the train lurched to a final stop and the driver announced mechanical difficulties. But no, the train is just working it’s way back to the west bound track. Once there, the train picks up speed and then immediately slows down again to come into the 60th street station.
I’m continually amazed at the people who board an overcrowded train. I wonder at their thought processes when the doors open and they are faced with a wall of people. In normal circumstances, I like a bit of space around my person. I completely understand the concept of the invisible two foot buffer we all have around us, and I get mighty annoyed when someone voluntarily enters my buffer zone. As a result, I’ll avoid an overcrowded train, taking a chance the next one isn’t so much. So when I see people get on a train that is so overcrowded as the one I was on yesterday, I gotta wonder what’s going through their minds. Do they see a sliver of space between the tall dude and the short babuska and figure they could just squeeze in? Are their lives so rushed that they absolutely MUST catch that train RIGHT NOW? Maybe, they’re proud of their body odor and want to share it with as many people as possible? I don’t know.
The one thing I want to get on record with yesterday’s fun is this. To all those people who think cars are evil and light rail is teh bomb, yo, the answer to all that which ails us in our commute, when the cops cordoned off that 10 square block area around the Doubletree, including the MAX track, that was it, the MAX train was stuck. It could not turn around and find another route to take. TriMet was forced to mobilize extra staff and extra buses to make sure that several hundred people could get where they wanted to go. All of us were at the mercy of TriMet and how TriMet was responding to the police cordon. There was no flexibility in the situation at all. All of the people driving cars around the area, while inconvenienced for sure, were able to instantly respond to the situation and decide on a half dozen different routes they could take to get around the area.
Sure, it’s nice having light rail as a ‘greener’ solution to cars, but the simple fact of the matter is that once you’ve laid down track for a light rail train, that’s it, that’s the route the train is going to take. It’s groovy when everything is running smoothly and there are no police incidents or mechanical break downs to affect things, but when something like that does happen, the entire train network is affected. The choices are extremely limited in how to deal with a problem.
On the other hand, when something happens on a roadway that affects hundreds, if not thousands, of individual cars, it is only that section of roadway that is affected. The number of choices an individual car has to avoid that spot is limited only by that person’s knowledge of that portion of the city and the routes that person knows. It is easier for the many individual cars to respond to a problem on a given route when there are a lot of alternatives to choose from than it is for a train on a fixed route.