Department of Homeland Security releases summary conclusions from national exercise

WASHINGTON -- The U. S. Department of Homeland Security has released summary conclusions from the exercise TOPOFF 2, the largest and most comprehensive terrorism response and homeland security exercise ever conducted in the United States. 

Very early in the Department's existence, TOPOFF 2 provided DHS with a substantive assessment of national response capability as well as recommendations for improvement.

"Our Nation must always be ready to face a serious attack, and we must have confidence in our response capabilities," said Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.  "In the Department's second month, we tested our incident management capabilities and pushed the response envelope at the federal, state, and local level like in no exercise before.  I want to recognize the tremendous efforts of our new Department of Homeland Security team and other federal, state, and local authorities around our Nation who worked so hard to make TOPOFF 2 an unprecedented and successful training event."

TOPOFF 2 was conducted May 12-16, 2003, and involved federal, state, local, and Canadian participants in a full-scale exercise that assessed how responders, leaders, and other authorities would react to the simulated release of weapons of mass destruction in two U. S. cities: Seattle and Chicago.  

The exercise scenario depicted a fictitious, foreign terrorist organization that detonated a simulated radiological dispersal device -- or dirty bomb -- in Seattle and released the pneumonic plague in several Chicago metropolitan area locations. There was also significant pre-exercise intelligence play, a cyber-attack, and credible terrorism threats against other locations. Specific goals of Exercise TOPOFF 2 were to:

• Identify vulnerabilities in the response system;
• Improve the nation's capacity to manage extreme events;
• Create frameworks for the operation of expert crisis and consequence management systems;
• Validate authorities, strategies, plans, policies, procedures, and protocols; and  
• Build a sustainable, systematic national exercise program to support the national strategy for homeland security.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Council, federal departments and agencies, and state and local responders are working diligently to address the findings identified during TOPOFF 2. DHS has led this effort on behalf of the federal government to revamp, centralize, and unify a range of pre-existing federal and other incident response contingency plans.  

The complete after action summary report for TOPOFF 2 is available at this link.