Austin Community College Emergency Management Program

Another example of how technology and foreign actors are combining to become new threats to Homeland Security.

How a Chinese Hacking Firm Tapped AI to Supercharge Cyber-Spying Internal company materials illustrate an AI-powered effort to make pilfered foreign government documents digestible for police; targets include Russia, Pakistan.

This is something that Emergency Managers and Homeland Security professionals need to be thinking about. One of the disadvantages of being in a country as large as ours is that it becomes impossible to keep an eye on every place from which a drone can be launched and every target a drone can hit.

Ukraine has used Russia's size against it, taking advantage of the fact that the country is just too big to protect everything. We need to start thinking now about how we can deal with this threat before it becomes a reality.

Opinion | Leipzig Attack Is a Warning of the Drone Threat Against Europe Pure luck saved Germany from a catastrophe. The European Union needs a comprehensive strategy.

The man who saved 2,687 lives on September 11 was the office joke. His endless fire drills annoyed everyone. Executives found them excessive. Then a voice on the loudspeaker told everyone to stay at their desks — and he picked up his radio.

His name was Rick Rescorla. Born in Hayle, Cornwall, on May 27, 1939. A boy who grew up watching American soldiers train in his village and decided he'd be one someday.

He was. Silver Star. Bronze Star with valor. Purple Heart. Vietnam, 1965, the Ia Drang Valley — the photo on the cover of the book about that battle is him, 26 years old, bayonet fixed. (This is referring to the original cover of the book, "We Were Soldiers Once and Young.")

But that's not why 2,687 people are alive.

In 1990, Rescorla and his friend Dan Hill walked the underground parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Rescorla looked at the unguarded columns and told the Port Authority a truck full of explosives could bring the whole thing down.

Nobody acted on it.

Three years later, on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb detonated in that exact garage. Six people lost their lives.

You'd think that would make people listen. It didn't.

Rescorla went back with a new warning: the next one comes from the air. He told Morgan Stanley to leave the towers entirely. The lease ran until 2006. They stayed.

So he did the only thing left to him. He drilled them.

Every few months, all 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees across 22 floors of the South Tower walked down the stairs. Two by two. Timed with a stopwatch. Traders complained the drills cost the firm money. Executives complained. He kept doing it anyway.

Do you know anyone who'd hold that line for eight years while everyone told them they were wasting time?

Then came 8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001. The North Tower was struck.

Rescorla's building — the South Tower — was untouched. And the Port Authority announcement came over the loudspeakers: everyone in the South Tower should return to their desks.

He was 62 years old. He had cancer. He had every reason to trust the official voice.

He ignored it.

He grabbed his bullhorn and his radio and started moving people. Not some of them. All 2,700. Down 44 flights, 60 flights, 70 flights — two by two, exactly as they'd practiced, exactly the way everyone had rolled their eyes at.

Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., Flight 175 hit the South Tower.

Most of his people were already in the stairwells.

And here's the part that survivors still can't talk about without stopping mid-sentence. As they descended, they heard singing. Rescorla, on the bullhorn, working through Cornish songs from his childhood and the British military tunes he'd sung to his men in Vietnam.

"Men of Cornwall stand ye steady." A 62-year-old man singing his village's songs into a bullhorn in a burning tower, so that frightened people wouldn't run.

Have you ever heard of a calmer act of leadership?

He called his wife Susan from the stairwell. He told her that if something happened to him, he wanted her to know she'd made his life. Then he went back to work.

He got them out. Nearly every one.

Then he turned around and went back up.

Someone asked him what he was doing. He said he'd rest when everyone else was out. He was last seen on the 10th floor stairwell, heading up, with four members of his security team beside him.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower came down.

Rick Rescorla and his four officers were taken from this world that morning. Of the roughly 2,700 Morgan Stanley people in the towers, 13 did not come home. Five of those 13 were the men who went back up.

2,687 walked out.

His remains were never recovered. What survives is a stairwell full of people who went home to their families because one stubborn man refused to be embarrassed by his own caution.

The drills nobody wanted. The warnings nobody read. The announcement he refused to obey.

Preparation isn't glamorous. Nobody thanks you for it. And on exactly one morning out of ten thousand, it's the only thing standing between 2,687 people and death.

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/the-fastest-growing-risk-to-air-travel-is-probably-in-your-pocket-602e4385?st=88XDzn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I've spoken often about the importance of continual study and learning from actual disasters, both recent and older. A great resource for this is the Spotify program, "Natural Disasters." While it appears that they have not posted new content since 2019, they've got a great library there and I encourage all of you to take a look at listen to their episodes.

I would especially call you attention to the two part episode about the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3dehYYDqsAenBv4zRAuAi5?si=UcHHMju3T8-O_ljg4P7S-Q

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4H9mKGBjuv568kp8d7wz9f?si=PGGNZzjESlCCCcZ-1gFFqw

It is an enlightening story of how heat waves work and the threat they pose, especially to urban populations. It is also a horrifying example of the cost of governmental incompetence and indifference.

The Chicago Heat Wave Pt. 2 Natural Disasters · Episode

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/serious-chemical-accidents-are-rising-in-the-u-s-and-getting-more-dangerous-e94fab53?st=HDYN2M&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Serious Chemical Accidents Are Rising in the U.S.—and Getting More Dangerous Aging infrastructure is making more plants susceptible to accidents. Many are repeat offenders.

https://www.wsj.com/pro/cybersecurity/cyber-threats-top-ceo-business-fears-7141c6c9?st=u5BWhC&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Cyber Threats Top CEO Business Fears For the first time since late 2024, leaders of large-cap companies are more worried about cyberattacks than geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainties.

California burn scar sprayed with glyphosate is now overrun with invasive mustard that burns like gasoline, activist warns (The Cool Down) A video filmed in California's Caldor Fire burn scar reignited debate over how burned forests should recover. In the Instagram Reel, Jessie Dickson (...

Those of you who are fans of the 1980's show M*A*S*H may remember those episodes that dealt with Korean Hemorrhagic Fever. That was a real thing; an American Soldier at Camp Casey, Korea died from it just a couple months after I rotated home in 1994. Korean Hemorrhagic Fever is caused by the Hanta Virus mentioned in this article. It was also the Hanta Virus that caused the death of Gene Hackman's wife at their New Mexico home last year. Although the Hanta Virus is not normally transmitted between people, it's one of those threats that out there and needs to be monitored and prepared for.

Inside the Global Effort to Figure Out Where Hantavirus Will Strike Next Health authorities, airlines and the operator of the ship are mobilizing to contain the spread of a pathogen that has killed three people.

Summer camps grapple with new state regulations

FOX 7 Austin 4 likes. "Summer camps grapple with new state regulations"