Playing for Keeps

On a clear October evening, the Atlanta Braves are playing the Milwaukee Brewers in the second game of the National League Championship Series at Atlanta's Turner Field as a poisonous gas cloud creeps toward the crowd of more than 50,000.

The plume is emanating from a burning rail car filled with chemicals, which minutes earlier exploded about three miles from the ballpark. Witnesses report several trains are ablaze, and they believe a few people are dead. Worse, a rail car near the flashpoint is believed to be carrying anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer that will suffocate anyone exposed to it for more than a few minutes. If ammonia has leaked into the cloud then, as it moves over the stadium, those fans not killed in a stampede will die from the chemical.

A team of emergency response managers in a command center nearby faces an awful choice: Allow rescue crews to race to the stadium, where they will be exposed to the cloud and be powerless to help tens of thousands of Atlantans downwind, or call them back. When the managers give the order to fall back, one of them remarks, "We just killed 50,000 people."

The fact that this is a simulation playing out on paper around a conference table on June 29 in Atlanta doesn't comfort the players. In real life four work for local police, fire or public works agencies and have spent the 1,022 days since Sept. 11 preparing for just this sort of disaster to occur. The steps they take during the simulation, all by the book and adhering to procedure, suggest they'd know what to do if the cloud were real.

The question is: Can federal, state and local officials, as well as local business- people and media, say the same? The Atlanta game makers hope to find an answer. More than 100 people from government and industry participated in the war game, as its authors from Booz Allen Hamilton call it. Since Sept. 11, the consulting firm has ginned up a cottage industry in war games-designed to get participants to practice their response to a real attack-staging more than 100 simulated disasters across the country, sometimes for governments, sometimes for industries or individual companies. Federal agencies such as the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency also have staged mock attacks on food supplies and mass transit. And a slew of software companies have written programs to help predict the damage of various assaults-particularly bombings of buildings-so government agencies can plan responses.

War games are becoming old hat for some players, particularly first responders-local police, fire and rescue personnel. On game-day morning, standing in line to fill up on bagels and juice, one local official turns brightly to a police officer next to him and says, "Oh, I remember you! We met at the Fayetteville weapons of mass destruction training!"

"Oh, yes," the police officer replies, recalling the exercise in an Atlanta suburb. "I knew you looked familiar."

First Moves

The attack's first moments are trying. The players have divided into teams representing the federal government, state and local authorities (namely the mayor's office), and the media, among others. Representatives from each team have established an emergency operations center to serve as the central nervous system for the response. A control room staffed by the game's masters issues new developments that everyone accepts as real.

With the first responders' dire assessment that the 50,000 Braves fans are lost, city officials prepare for more casualties. They ask the Federal Aviation Administration to suspend all flights over Atlanta. They route interstate traffic away from the rapidly spreading cloud. They debate whether the mayor should go on television and tell citizens in the cloud path to "shelter in place" rather than run.

In a conference room posing as the federal government's base of operations, things are much quieter. The team receives information via phone and e-mail, but doesn't issue much. Officials say they've received no requests for help. But a few are perturbed to be getting calls directly from local agencies and first responders, rather than receiving updates "through the chain," as one player puts it, through the state emergency management office, which local officials are supposed to call. The federal team's most visible action is raising the national terrorism threat level to orange, or high.

It's a vision of things to come. Over the next few hours, federal officials will spend much of their time reacting to what they hear and attempting to keep information from the news media. Even when President Bush is asked to declare a national emergency, local teams on the ground perform the grunt work.

Indeed, the players closest to the imaginary action work hardest. All teams, from the federal to the state to the city businesses and the mayor, turn to the first responders and the emergency operations center for advice and updates. One exception is the business team, which no one seems to consult or ask for help. The players, starved for attention, leak a bogus report to the news media that local business will lose $12 billion a day if the downtown area is shut down by the chemical cloud. The reporters don't bite.

All those reactions are more important than particular developments in the game or even playing by the rules, because the objective of any simulation is to make people behave realistically, says Mark Herman, a vice president with Booz Allen who's been writing war games for almost 40 years. "Human beings are very complex models," he says. "You could tell me a lot about what you know, but not everything." War games make people show what they know by placing them under pressure in the moment. When a game concludes, players might appreciate how hard other people's jobs are and be more likely to collaborate with them when planning for a real attack, Herman says.

Sometimes it works. "I haven't participated in anything that made me appreciate both the value of our first responders and . . . our real vulnerability to terrorist attack or major catastrophe. It scared the hell out of me," says Richard Long, an account manager with Verizon Wireless in Atlanta, who departed from his private-sector life and played on the first-responder team.

Second-Half Heroics

In a second round, the teams have a chance to improve. The control room reports that even as the chemical cloud turns out not to be deadly, the lethal disease known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, has begun spreading throughout the city. This time, to avoid panic and confusion, the teams start working together.

A health care team of doctors and hospital administrators contacts disease specialists at the federal level to help test people showing up in emergency rooms with flu-like symptoms. The team appoints a media spokesman who briefs reporters and admonishes them to get the word out on how to avoid the illness. The governor's office holds regular press conferences on the chemical cleanup and the SARS outbreak. And federal and city officials start holding joint press conferences. As soon as things start to click, though, the game's controllers throw curveballs.

More SARS cases are confirmed. Some patients have boarded planes and left the country. Should the federal government declare a world health emergency? And then, testing the bounds of reality, terrorists attack the Atlanta airport, detonating a bomb near several large jet fuel tanks. The media team later learns that city officials were alerted to the bomb's presence and had cleared the area, probably saving lives. Several imagined hours later, health officials are reporting no new SARS cases, and the FBI is investigating who attacked the airport and whether it was connected to the train explosion. For now, the crisis is being handled.

Even though the players in this simulation figured out how to work together, several said that officials in the real world still aren't reading from the same playbook. Many local governments still haven't implemented plans for when the federal government's color-coded alert system is raised a notch, for example, even though each level requires specific security tightening measures. A suburban Atlanta police officer contends that federal law enforcement agencies still aren't sharing intelligence about terrorist activities. "Don't even get me started on what the feds don't tell us," he says.

The game caused some players to bemoan their own lack of readiness and how difficult it has been, even in an age of heightened terrorism awareness, to make others understand the gravity of the threat. "If this happens," says the police officer, referring to the consecutive chain of disasters that befell the city, "We can't fix this. . . . We're just carrying the bodies out."