The Homeland Security Advisory System Makes a Lot of Sense

Look out!  The Terror Alert is up to red!  Run for the hills!  But, wait, it's only red for flights from the UK to the US.  It's orange for all domestic flights, and all flights inbound to the US from foreign lands unless it's from the UK (then it's red).  Otherwise it's still yellow, like it has been for years now.  Now it doesn't look that confusing, but then you have Yahoo!'s (not sure how long that link will be accurate) lead story saying "US terror alert raised to red."  Thanks for scaring the crap out of people who actually get scared by silly little colors, 10 million people just locked themselves inside thier basements.

Now, I never really pay attention to this whole system, the boogeyman doesn't scare me, and that's what the terrorists really are.  Besides, if everyone gets scared over a color, haven't the terrorists already won?  Since I don't really know what the colors mean, I decided to educate myself.  All this stuff is from the Department of Homeland Security's website.

There it is, you would think that they'd have a better quality picture, but they don't.  Here's what you do at each color (from the PDF accessible from the above link):

• Green -- Low Risk
  • Develop a family emergency plan.  Share it with family and friends, and practice the plan.  And to go to ready.gov to make your plan.  Oops, haven't done this, supposedly everyone is supposed to carry around little cards with phone numbers, meeting locations, medical, and insurance info.
  • Create an emergency supply kit, and this kit can be quite enormous.  Try keeping 3 gallons of water, per person, sitting around.  Not to mention all the batteries for flashlights and radios they want us to have.  I don't know what they want us to prepare for, but if you prepare for the end of the world, you may be ready.
  • Visit ready.gov to stay informed.
  • Know how to shelter in place and how to turn off utilities to your home.  If a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon is used, none of this will matter anyway, don't even bother.  Naval studies have proven that less than half of saliors on a ship will survive a chemical or biological attack because gas masks fail.  If gas masks fail, how are you going to seal your house airtight?  And the only thing that will save you from a nuke is distance (or a house encased in a lot of lead, assuming it survived the inital blast).
  • Examine volunteer opportunities in your community, and donate your time.  That means it's mandatory?  Bugger.
    
  • Consider completing a first aid or CPR course.  Ok, considered.
• Blue -- Guarded Risk
  • Complete Green steps
  • Review stored disaster supplies and replace items that are outdated.  This is a big duh step, why keep supplies if they aren't good?  So change out all that water every week or so.
  • Be alert to suspicious activiy and report it.  What constitutes suspicious?  Unfortunately this means that some people have probably been reported for doing nothing illegal except waiting for someone to get off of work.  I can see something really obvious, like a group of people carrying a nuclear bomb over thier heads, but I'm not going to scrutinize every little thing someone does on the train.  That's just paranoia.
• Yellow -- Elevated Risk, the level we are always at
  • Complete green and blue steps
  • Ensure disaster supply kit is stocked and ready.  Again?
  • Check phone numbers in family emergency plan and update as necessary.  If you have a plan, isn't this already done.
  • Develop alternate routes to/from work and practice them.  Are the terrorists following us now?  Again with the paranoia
  • Continue to be alert for suspicious activity.
• Orange -- High Risk
  • Complete lower steps
  • Exercise caution when traveling, pay attention to travel advisories.  We already exercise caution (or should), we don't want to be mugged.
  • Review plan again.
  • Be patient, expect delays, baggage serches, and restrictions.  Yeah, so they can take our liquids and gels out of our baggage and sell them on eBay.
  • Check on neighbors or others that may need assistance in an emergency.  OK, what if there's no emergency yet?  Do we still need to bother others every hour on the hour?  Or is it every half hour on the half hour?
• Red -- Severe Risk
  Complete lower steps
  • Listen to local emergency management officials.  If there's a real emergency sure, but if it's just boogeyman talk, I'm going to call you out on it.
  • Stay tuned to TV or radio for info.  Piece of cake, Americans love a great disaster flick, the more real the better.
  • Expect traffic delays and restrictions.  That's the norm here in Chicago, something's always under construction.
  • Provide volunteer services only as requested.  What was the point in making us learn the stuff if you don't want us to use them?
  • Contact your school/business to determine status of work day.  Well, I'll save you the trouble.  Unless something really happened, you will have to stay at work.

This system just boggles my mind.  What do those low, elevated, guared, high, and severe risks mean?  I don't know, and there's probably no one that will give a straight answer.  And today, shouldn't the terror alert from the UK to the US already have been at red (or at least orange) before the terrorists were caught?  It doesn't make much sense to raise the alert all the way to red after the fact. 

There should only be 3 steps: nothing is happening, something might happen, and something will happen.  Right now nothing is happening, and the thing that might have happened was diffued before it could happen.  Sitting at yellow all the time, saying something might happen just feeds the paranoia.  Paranoia breeds fear, and fear is what terrorists deliver.  It's unfortunate that the government is the one breeding this fear, and blaming on the boogeyman terrorists.