We sweep into the SitRoom and it looks like someone kicked a fire ant hill. Every station is manned and there are at least three times as many people in here as there usually are, everyone trying to gather information and figure out what the hell’s going on.
Fifteen minutes later, the full magnitude of this starts sinking in.
It’s…bad.
Everything kicked off nearly an hour earlier with a wave of bomb threats called in to airports, power stations, water treatment facilities, and other vulnerable targets across the country.
That diverted law enforcement resources and created immediate chaos.
Meaning when the real attacks started, response times were delayed due to law enforcement deployments elsewhere.
Dozens of vehicles were near the top of the Skyway Bridge when two large truck bombs and several smaller car bombs detonated, in lanes heading in both directions. The damage from the bombs caused swaths of road decking to drop. Several passing vehicles were destroyed by their proximity to the blast, and heat from the fires from those vehicles created additional damage. More vehicles ended up in Tampa Bay, while others dropped onto an outbound cruise ship just passing underneath the bridge. The cruise ship also sustained heavy damages and lost power due to both the bridge collapse as well as another, smaller vessel ramming into its stern and exploding, damaging the cruise ship’s hull and props and disabling it.
The Skyway Bridge was apparently the first attack, perhaps even scheduled specifically because the vessel departure times are set by the tides and the harbor pilots, so it’d be easy for someone to calculate when a vessel would be in prime position. And a cruise ship is a much more attractive soft target than a freighter, and ties up far more emergency resources.
The cruise ship is being evacuated. Adding to the confusion and impeding the rescue efforts are rightful suspicions on the part of law enforcement and the Coast Guard about any small private vessels racing to respond and render aid and help with the passenger evacuation. Another complication, if all that wasn’t enough, is that the bridge spans three counties, and car bombs detonated in all three. There are rescue vessels on site from sheriff’s departments, state wildlife officers, the Coast Guard, DHS and Border Patrol, and several local cities and towns from both sides of the bay. And the two fishing piers flanking the bridge, made from remnants of the original bridge, are extremely popular with anglers, so dozens of private vessels are trying to assist in the rescue and evacuation.
It’s mass chaos.
Because the cruise ship was in the middle of their emergency muster practice when the attack occurred, most of the passengers and crew were out on the decks, increasing the casualty count. It also means nearly everyone on board had on a life jacket, and was either at or on the way to their assigned lifeboat station. Hundreds of passengers were injured, and dozens were immediately killed by the falling bridge debris and vehicles. There are reports some people who took refuge inside are now trapped by fires or structural damage.
With the attack at the Skyway Bridge—the only deep channel in and out of Tampa Bay—the Port of Tampa is now closed to vessel traffic.
Meaning fuel can’t be brought in via tanker ship, which is how the large metropolitan Tampa/St. Petersburg area receives the bulk of their supply.
It also means interstate traffic in the region is snarled to a standstill because the Skyway Bridge is the main artery between St. Pete and the Bradenton/Sarasota area. What was a thirty-minute drive has now become an hours-long journey, in some cases. It’s also a vital hurricane evacuation route and we’re approaching storm season.
Leo was right about this being a coordinated attack. A Coast Guard vessel intercepted two speedboats heading toward the New Orleans locks and exchanged gunfire with the three occupants. We’ve got one Coastie dead and another three injured, but they stopped the vessels before they completed their attack and killed all three men. The explosive payload on one of the vessels detonated outside the lock area without damaging it or any other vessels, other than the second speedboat it’d been traveling with, which also sank. Traffic through the locks is currently shut down because of the attack and because the wreckage is blocking the channel, meaning all commercial cargo vessel traffic in that area is shut down, too.
The Coast Guard intercepted two more small boats in Seattle and exchanged fire, sinking both and detonating the payload on one without doing any damage to other vessels or structures. Again, all three men on the vessels were killed. A bridge in Miami was severely damaged, blocking port access. There are ongoing situations in New York, Port Everglades, Boston, Houston, and at least ten other locations. No one knows if this is the entirety of the attack or merely a first wave.
There are casualties, obviously, but they’re still being calculated and the true numbers won’t be known for days, if not weeks.
An hour later, I’m seated at the conference table in the SitRoom and staring in stunned shock at the bank of monitors showing various live feeds—a mix of newscasts, traffic cameras, and livestreams from social media—of the attacks. And these aren’t even all of the attacks.
As of right now there are eighteen confirmed incidents and possibly another dozen more that might turn out to be part of the attack and which aren’t incidental situations or false alarms.
It’s…staggering. I’m numb as I sign the multiple emergency declarations to unlock critical federal aid in both money and resources for local and state jurisdictions.
“Is all air traffic grounded yet?” I ask the FAA director, who was brought to the SitRoom.
“Not yet, sir. In progress. Eighty percent grounded. Some larger aircraft had to continue or divert to airfields that can accommodate them.”
This is backing up inbound international air traffic that was too far from other airfields to divert and safely land elsewhere. Fighter jets from military bases around the country were scrambled and are moving to intercept and escort any aircraft that must continue into US air space.
Canada, Mexico, and Iceland have accepted several dozen flights but we’ve got US citizens on board those planes who were returning home, plus we now have citizens stranded all over the world.
This is an absolute nightmare.
And no telling how long air traffic will stay grounded, much less how long it’ll take to clear the backlog once we reopen our airspace. There will be aviation and jet fuel logistics to deal with, control tower crew staffing issues—it’s exactly the kind of thing I hoped to never deal with on my watch.
The only plus about this situation is we have a solid plan to deal with that part of the recovery, because we’ve lived through it before.
And we don’t have nonstop coverage of collapsing skyscrapers morbidly looping on TV.
Yet.
We do however have an increasing number of videos circulating on social media courtesy of the media and witnesses. So far, no one’s claimed responsibility for the attacks. Despite the deaths of some of the attackers as they were challenged either by law enforcement or the Coast Guard, these don’t appear to be suicide attacks. With the situation in an extreme state of flux, we don’t know yet if anyone’s been arrested who was responsible for any of the attacks, and the dead attackers have not yet been identified.
