"We've ended the exercise safely," said Corey Gruber, the operation's associate director told United Press International. Secretary Ridge met with 150 officials at a "hotwash," an immediate de-briefing where the agencies involved delivered their preliminary impressions.
"We went through a very brief presentation from each agency, to get their initial impressions about whether they'd accomplished their objectives, and get some insights and comments about ways to improve the exercise design, and address some of the shortcomings we saw as a result of it," said Gruber.
"People are packing up their equipment, collecting their files and heading home for a well-deserved break," he added, speaking from the exercise headquarters in a hotel in Northern Virginia.
He said the most important difficulty identified had been communication - especially between different departments and agencies.
"It's not just an issue of equipment," he explained. "Every agency has its own terminology and protocols for communication. If you put 121 of them together, communicating the same information about a scenario, you'll find that each uses their own communications protocols, their own acronyms. ... Making sure that everyone has a common operational picture is very complex, a real challenge."
Since Monday, more than 8,000 officials have taken part in TOPOFF2 in Seattle, Chicago and Washington, testing their readiness to respond to multiple terror attacks that use weapons of mass destruction.
Gruber said the exercise had been designed to test systems and personnel under the most adverse conditions.
"The first goal of this exercise was to look at the most extreme and complex events we might ever face. ... We wanted to make the stress on all the systems such that we would be really testing their capacity."
He called the exercise, dubbed TOPOFF2 for "top officials," "the best test you'll ever get outside of the real event."
Simulating a radioactive "dirty bomb" explosion in Seattle and the covert release of a biowarfare agent in Chicago, TOPOFF2 was coordinated by the new Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. State Department.
The exercise was designed to test the ability of federal, state and local authorities to respond to a two-pronged attack -- described by officials as a plausible scenario -- by a fictional foreign terror group dubbed Glodo, the Group for the Liberation of Orangeland and the Destruction of Others.
Details of more than 800 separate developments - referred to by the event planners as "stimuli" - were contained in a 200-page script. Representatives of the 121 federal and other agencies involved - sitting together in the northern Virginia center - fed the "stimuli" back to their colleagues, who then reacted as they would do in a real emergency.
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
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