Orange alert hasn’t really changed how you live. There are more police, maybe. You have to show your ID to get into a government building, maybe. Red alert, which appears likely when the attack on Iraq begins, is another thing altogether.
The Homeland Security Department describes it this way:
- Increasing or redirecting personnel to address critical emergency needs;
- Assigning emergency response personnel and pre-positioning and mobilizing specially trained teams or resources;
- Monitoring, redirecting, or constraining transportation systems; and
- Closing public and government facilities.
Individual state and county agencies are given a great deal of leeway in how they interpret these alerts. Sid Caspersen, the Director of the New Jersey Office of Counter-Terrorism, is pretty specific:
“Red means all noncritical functions cease… Noncritical would be almost all businesses, except health-related.
“The state police and the emergency management people would take control over the highways…
“You literally are staying home, is what happens, unless you are required to be out. No different than if you had a state of emergency with a snowstorm.”
…well, a little different.
Update: Sun Mar 23 15:08:01 EST 2003
The ACLU is making themselves pretty clear on the NJ policy.
a technology job is no excuse 
This just sounds like post-Sept 11th. I don’t think they’d plunge the country back into that again when war starts. It would go on too long and would be economically devastating. And this is supposed to be, remember, a free and easy kind of war. I think it only goes red if the US is under attack.
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Yeah, not only is Red Alert interpreted by local authorities in different ways, but it’s vagueness makes them reluctant to come up with concrete procedures. They don’t even have specific plans, let alone experience running them. Haven’t run any drills, exercises, or anything.
Shit, here in DC we’ve had a guy on a tractor practically cripple the city for the past 2 days. There is no evacuation plan, and the traffic patterns here are bad enough on a good day.
Red Alert will be much worse.
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