The atrocious recent multiple-bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon brought back memories to this former Boston resident.  In the early 1970s, I was working in downtown Boston for an agency which had received several bomb threats.  One day in the early Spring I received a phone call at work from the Post Office serving my office building, asking me to come down to “identify a suspicious package.”

When I arrived shortly after the call, several of Boston’s Finest were at the Post Office,  and I was shown to a small internal room where the package in question was on a table.   I was asked if I recognized the return address, and I confirmed that it came from my family in Tunnel, New York and that I even recognized the handwriting.  Still, I was asked to open the brown-paper-wrapped package in the small room all by myself, while both Post Office staff and Boston’s finest kept their distance outside the heavy internal walls.  Since the package contained home-baked cookies, the least I could do was to offer them around. 

Upon returning to the office, the regional director of my agency told me that a nearby building housed both the Irish and Israeli consulates, and there had been previous bomb threats and suspicious packages — so the Boston authorities had learned to be very careful.  But, fast forwarding to the 2013 Boston Marathon,  it seems that the need for extreme caution and care in dealing with risks at public events has yet to be learned, not only in Boston (where the post-event official response has been outstanding) but, indeed, throughout the United States of America.  There are vital steps which this nation should have taken decades ago to prevent or mitigate the very-real hazards of both internal and external terrorist or terrorist-type attacks.  We have yet to take many of those steps.

By the late 1990s, I had become first an emergency management volunteer in Vermont, and then a professional hazard mitigation consultant for the Office of Emergency Management in New Hampshire.  Prior to that, I had worked for the Development Corporation for Israel in Connecticut, and had noted on trips to that fledgling nation that the level of preparedness for bombings and other attacks was far above anything present in the USA.  After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, I studied the situation and developed the Centurion Program,  which proposed an American Home Guard (similar to Israel’s) in which one person out of every hundred U.S. citizens would be recruited and trained for awareness to all sorts of threats, particularly bombings — and would thus become a Centurion, the ancient Roman term for a soldier leading 100 troops.  MOREHERE