Question

You are an off-duty Chicago Police Department S.W.A.T. Team Commander. You are at National Car Rental, located on Bessie Coleman Drive, returning a rental car as you plan to shuttle to nearby O’Hare International Airport. The line is moving incredibly slow and there are five people in front of you. You look at your watch to check the time- and realize that you are almost late based upon your time estimates. It is 3:30 p.m. and your flight leaves at 4:15.

BOOM! The floor shakes and people scream. You immediately go outside and look towards the source of the blast…and it appears to have come from O’Hare International Airport. You stand there, for a few seconds, with your eyes and ears sharply tuned-in to the direction of the blast. You see nothing.

You open your tactical bag, which you luckily brought with you as a carry-on item, and pull out your binoculars. You survey the visible portions of the airport. Nothing.

You grab your cell phone and call the S.W.A.T. team Lieutenant, Gaven, to see if there have been any reports on the incident.

“Gaven…you there? It’s me.”

“Hey Boss- look man, I hope you had a good flight but we just got a call- it’s GO TIME!” he replied.

“Whoa- hang on! I am still here- I am at National Car Rental on Bessie Coleman Drive- and I just heard a loud boom from O’Hare. I am Northeast of O’Hare, and…”

“Boss!” Gaven interrupted. “Get over to O’Hare now. We got a call that a bomb exploded in the FlyHigh airport terminal and the communications went dead…and we received phone calls from people in the airport saying that this is a mass-casualty event and hundreds of people needing rescue. Meet me at the insertion rally point (IRP), that we use for training there, and you can suite and boot.”

“Roger that!” You reply. I never get a day off…

You grab the rental car and arrive at the IRP quickly. You can now see smoke coming out of a jet bridge linked to the FlyHigh terminal. Your cell phone vibrates and you turn around to see your team driving towards you.

“Hey Boss! Let’s move it!” Gaven said as you approached the S.W.A.T. truck.

“Give me a sit-rep as I gear up” you reply, already knowing that Gaven has all of the known information as of right now. He was good like that.

“Okay Boss- here’s what we got. At 1531 (3:31 p.m. for you civilian types), as FlyHigh was exiting a flight that just arrived, a suicide bomber set off a nitroglycerine bomb…”

You cut him off. “Hang on- liquid explosives? What-”

“No offense Boss, but stay quiet. I will get to that. Anyway, federal authorities have been notified and they are sending in the FBI’s Hostage Negotiation and Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). We don’t know if there are more terrorists or if they have any hostages, yet you know the routine. We were tapped as the first responders…so guess what? You are the Incident Commander.”

“…so we have nothing? REALLY? None of the phone calls that came in told us anything more than mass casualties and hundreds injured?” You reply, fairly flabbergasted.

“Nope. The dispatchers said that the calls were frantic and all they heard was a lot of screaming and noise in the background, and no dispatcher hear gunfire.”

“Alright, Gaven. Let’s rock ‘n roll! Saddle up the Team and follow me.”

Your Team easily enters the FlyHigh terminal. You took a back entrance (Secret Entrance 41, or SE41) that only S.W.A.T. teams, and other federal first-response teams, know exist. Meanwhile, while monitoring the radio chatter in the process of approaching the scene, you hear that people are frantically running out of the airport, cars have clogged up all entrances and exists to the airport, and law enforcement is slowly clearing an entrance point and triaging the known injuries. This out-of-control scene has only allowed for four police units, one firetruck, and two EMS trucks to arrive on location. The remainder of the first responders are stuck in traffic.

You advise dispatch that you don’t know the disposition of the rest of the airport because you are taking SE41 to make initial contact. You advise to prioritize law enforcement securing the remainder of the airport.

Your Team enters the FlyHigh terminal and quickly determines that there are no more existing threats. However, the scene is how you would imagine it to be; the death, carnage, and screams for help is something that no horror movie could replicate.

You provide a sit-rep to dispatch and then hear another loud BOOM from another part of the airport. You make sure everyone on your Team is ‘green’ and get back on the radio to notify dispatch. You didn’t have a chance to say anything- your Team is ordered to the front entrance where the first responders are.

You arrive to the new scene and call in a quick sit-rep.

“This is Boss. The Team has arrived to the second event. There is a second mass-casualty event.”

Your Team surveys the area briefly and gives you a report to call in to the higher command.

“This is Boss. Advise that a second nitroglycerine bomb attack occurred at the second incident location. No surviving first responders. Estimated more than 100 injured. HazMat team and staging area needed.”

Within three hours, a perimeter has been set up around O’Hare International Airport, your command post is in place, HazMat has set up a staging area and is cleaning the area, and all of the casualties and injured have been removed. Hundreds of people have arrived to check on their loved ones and this is creating quite a disturbance to your operations command.

You are then briefed by the HazMat operations commander that the area contaminated by nitroglycerine is larger than thought. HazMat states that they need you push back the scene entrance by 300 feet.

The incident is finally resolved twelve hours later. Boy, are you tired! You begin demobilizing resources and the assessment procedures. You then work with other departments to review your response. You check your timeline to make sure that you have all of the necessary information because you know that there will be countless inquiries…and an internal investigation by the Chicago Police Department.

Instructions:

3. DESIGN a plan for each Outcome (for each Stage: Prevention Preparedness Stage, the Response Stage, and the Recovery & Mitigation Stage. This includes identification of the Crisis, Scene Management, and Executive Management Stages (under the Response Stage)), that Boss failed to meet, that analyzes what Boss could have done to meet each Outcome that he failed to reach in each stage.

Please include 2 or more APA cited credible citations. Thank you

Answer 1

1. Prevention Preparedness

As we can get it from the case that the incident already occured, which means the prevention preparedness seems to be bad. First thing is that there is a error in security screening itself, allowing an individual to carry liquid bomb. This requires, better training for those individuals.

If we look from the above mentioned teams perspective, they could have prevented mass casualties from second incident, by clearing the airport after first blast, which is never mentioned in the above case. And SWAT team took time to arrive. In locations, as sensitive as airport, it is always good to have a standby team all the time for such incidents.

Response Stage

Once they receive the calls from people, the team hasn't responded quickly enough. Only once they received the call from the leader they are looking towards taking action. This needs to be considered. In situations when they receive calls on attacks they should operate quickly.

Along with that they are waiting for FBI to send a couple of teams for its rescue operation, which again seems like they are not ready enough to work on such situations.

Recovery & Mitigation

Observe the gaps and identify the places where they spent more time & also involved in waiting to get help from other teams and then come up with a long term strategy to avoid such situations, so that the preparedness goes up and crisis management will be quicker.