Houston announced Thursday that it won a three-year, $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for system analysis and training. The grant is meant to catalyze more investment in such preparations, DHS said in a statement earlier this month.
The city's director of homeland security explained that Houston is one of the six American cities that DHS says is at highest risk for a terrorist attack.
"A lot of it has to do with population, and critical infrastructure," Dennis Storemski, director of the Mayor's Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security, said in a phone interview Thursday. "We have the largest or second-largest port in the country. ... We have a large chemical industry. We have a number of major companies that are housed here."
While everyone agrees New York City and Washington, D.C., bear the greatest risk, he added, "Houston is among the top tier."
Storemski's office said in a statement Thursday that the city will use the funding to "conduct a gap analysis of current processes, establish a program to improve these gaps, develop training programs and conduct regional exercises."
One issue to address is how law enforcement should act, Storemski said - when frontline officers need to act without waiting for specialized groups like SWAT teams or bomb squads.
The city's homeland security office will convene the Houston Police Department and the Houston Fire Department (which includes emergency medical services) as well as other area agencies such as the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
This grant's work aims to build on 2011 planning that brought agencies together for tabletop simulations, said Storemski, who took the director's position in 2005 after serving 38 years with HPD.
He added that his office hopes to develop online training programs that can speed up the process of training large agencies such as HPD, where it can take a year to train all 5,000 or so officers.
The national grant program aims to help state and local governments prepare for "complex, coordinated terrorist attacks," which the city defined as strikes that:
- involve synchronized and independent team(s) at multiple locations
- are conducted sequentially or in close succession
- are initiated with little or no warning
- employ one or more weapon systems
- and intended to result in large numbers of casualties
Multi-pronged attacks have grown more common globally in recent years. DHS said other strikes in Boston; San Bernadino, Calif.; London; Brussels; and Nairobi, Kenya "highlight an emerging threat known as complex coordinated terrorist attacks."
Other Texas agencies that got some of the $36 million national total are the city of Dallas, Galveston County, the state Department of Public Safety and the South East Texas Regional Planning Commission.
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