.Reporter's interest forged in Iraq
Hi.
My name is Carl Prine. I'm an investigative report for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
In 2005, I left journalism for a year and joined the National Guard. I fought as an infantry soldier in the Anbar province of Iraq.
While there, I became very interested in the evolving bomb-making technology of the insurgents and the effects they were having against even the most armored of our vehicles.
When you've lost a couple of buddies to IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and you see the locomotives on Iraqi rails abandoned, because their critical infrastructure is now something of a no man's land, you realize that an entire generation of militants has learned how to slice open our hazmat tank cars.
And, I guess my fear is that someday, some of these men might come to America and teach us what they've learned in Iraq.
In July, a couple of weeks after I got back from Iraq, I was sent to New Jersey -- that was a plum assignment -- and the experiment I was given was pretty simple: Could I simply walk up to a tank car, put my business card in the placard, photograph the tank cars -- sometimes ride on them, sometimes crawl all over them -- wave to workers and simply leave?
Not only was that a definite "yes" to all of the questions in that experiment, but I was able to pretty much replicate this thing in Atlanta, Seattle, Tacoma, numerous sites around the San Fransisco Bay area, Las Vegas and also at port facilities in Oregon and Washington.
So, we ended up with about 50 places, in seven states, surrounded by pretty heavily urbanized populations that are open to terrorists.
These rail cars go through major population centers and they carry potentially catastrophic, highly toxic or explosive chemicals, stuff like chlorine gas, anhydrous ammonia or fuming sulfuric acid, and also flammables such as propane or liquid petroleum gas -- what a first-responder would call LPG.
Firefighters will be the first ones to tell you just how nasty some of this stuff is. Chlorine was a weapon of mass destruction in World War I. The gas is is so corrosive it will eat through human teeth.
I think the question we're asking is: Have we prepositioned weapons of mass destruction in our major cities?
PittsburgLive
My name is Carl Prine. I'm an investigative report for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
In 2005, I left journalism for a year and joined the National Guard. I fought as an infantry soldier in the Anbar province of Iraq.
While there, I became very interested in the evolving bomb-making technology of the insurgents and the effects they were having against even the most armored of our vehicles.
When you've lost a couple of buddies to IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and you see the locomotives on Iraqi rails abandoned, because their critical infrastructure is now something of a no man's land, you realize that an entire generation of militants has learned how to slice open our hazmat tank cars.
And, I guess my fear is that someday, some of these men might come to America and teach us what they've learned in Iraq.
In July, a couple of weeks after I got back from Iraq, I was sent to New Jersey -- that was a plum assignment -- and the experiment I was given was pretty simple: Could I simply walk up to a tank car, put my business card in the placard, photograph the tank cars -- sometimes ride on them, sometimes crawl all over them -- wave to workers and simply leave?
Not only was that a definite "yes" to all of the questions in that experiment, but I was able to pretty much replicate this thing in Atlanta, Seattle, Tacoma, numerous sites around the San Fransisco Bay area, Las Vegas and also at port facilities in Oregon and Washington.
So, we ended up with about 50 places, in seven states, surrounded by pretty heavily urbanized populations that are open to terrorists.
These rail cars go through major population centers and they carry potentially catastrophic, highly toxic or explosive chemicals, stuff like chlorine gas, anhydrous ammonia or fuming sulfuric acid, and also flammables such as propane or liquid petroleum gas -- what a first-responder would call LPG.
Firefighters will be the first ones to tell you just how nasty some of this stuff is. Chlorine was a weapon of mass destruction in World War I. The gas is is so corrosive it will eat through human teeth.
I think the question we're asking is: Have we prepositioned weapons of mass destruction in our major cities?
PittsburgLive
posted by madtom at 12:58 AM
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