mass transit workers, port
workers and others — in maintaining the safety and security of
America’s bridges, tunnels and roads.”
The average truck
spends 100,000 miles on the highway a year — 10 times more than an
average car, Falcon instructor Mike Meagher said. So recruiting
truckers as extra eyes and ears on the highway makes sense, he said.
Falcon owner Tim Seymour, a former Fairfield resident now living in Palm Springs, summed it up.
“The idea is to train truckers to be able to identify suspicious activity, to assess what they observe and report it,” he said.
Hertan
told the Falcon instructors that a First Observer-type program might
have made a difference in the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings,
Seymour said.
“Someone actually saw someone leave a
backpack on a train, but no one reported it, and we all know what
happened there,” he said.
(More than 191 people were
killed and 1,800 others injured in Madrid on March 11, 2004, when
terrorists set off a coordinated series of bombs on commuter trains.)
Transportation
professionals are given a special phone number to report suspicious
activity, said Seymour, whose parents founded Falcon in 1982. Seymour
said he and his wife Suzanne took over the operation in 2002.
“We were told not to try confronting anyone. Just if you see something a little bit off, call,” he said.
Calls go to a special center, where trained operators assess it and route it to the appropriate authorities, Hertan said.
Hertan told the Falcon instructors there is no such thing as a stupid call, the men said.
An
example of something a trucker would recognize as “a little off,” that
the average motorist might not, would be the truck that in January,
2001, was intentionally driven into the state capitol in Sacramento,
Falcon instructor Robert Richardson said.
“That truck was
too long, too big to be there, it was illegal to be there,” said
Richardson, a former CHP officer now living in Red Bluff. “If I’d seen
it, I would have known there was something wrong, and I would have
called 911.”
Certain graffiti can be a terrorist message,
the men were told. People hanging around where they don’t seem to
belong, a gas tanker parked on the Bay Bridge or downtown — anything a
trucker might recognize as unusual or out of place, should prompt a
call, the truckers learned.
“Even if one call doesn’t
amount to anything, if they put together enough seemingly random
information, they could discover evidence of a terror cell operating,”
said Meagher, a Cordelia resident. “I also tell my students to watch
out for their own equipment, to be observant. You can unwittingly
become the carrier of explosives that can do damage.”
Among
the most shocking things the men said they learned was “what five
pounds of C-4 can do to a Greyhound bus,” Richardson said.
“Disintegrates it completely. They showed that on a video.”
Falcon’s
instructors said they never expected to be on the front lines of the
nation’s war on terror. “But truckers tend to be pretty patriotic,
always have been,” Meagher said. “We’re more than willing to do this.
The threat exists and we all have to pay attention if we want to keep
our nation safe.”
First Observers is an extension of
“Highway Watchers,” a similar program launched shortly after the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he said.
Seymour said
he will be developing a First Observer-based curriculum element over
the next several weeks, and include it in Falcon students’ regular
coursework starting in October.
