Idea of Terrorist Attack Missing From City Guide

By Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 31, 2007

A set of booklets designed to prepare the city's students for a range of natural and manmade disasters is missing one obvious crisis scenario: a terrorist attack.

The Bloomberg administration is distributing 1.3 million children's safety guides that make no mention of the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the possibility of a future terrorist attack. The city has produced a booklet for elementary school students and another for middle school and high school students.

The city's guide for older students depicts a range of troubles on its cover, including a heat wave, power outage, hurricane, flood, fire, and explosion. "These Things Happen Here, Too," it says. "New York, It's Time To Get Ready."

The guide also includes short stories about how teenagers battled unexpected events, including a fire, the 2003 blackout, and a water main break in an apartment.

Speaking at P.S. 29 in Brooklyn yesterday to announce the new emergency preparedness campaign, Mayor Bloomberg said the city's Office of Emergency Management, which worked to put out the booklets, should be preparing New Yorkers "for those things that are most likely."

Referring to the photographs of six disaster scenarios on the pamphlet cover, Mr. Bloomberg said that all the situations are so likely that nearly all of them have happened during his time in office.

"A hurricane is much more likely than something, a terrible tragedy like 9/11," he said. "When it really gets to be that scale, what you can count on is a bunch of dedicated people who have been training all the time, but you can't plan for something like that."

The outreach program is an extension of the city's 2003 campaign, "Ready New York."

The city paid $350,000 to produce the pamphlets and an insurance and financial services company, AIG, gave $100,000 to the effort.