The first hint of calamity came in deceptively routine form: a small fire in a rented Carson warehouse, apparently sparked by welders working on a lunch truck. But an investigation of that blaze turned up alarming details: respirators, a suspicious hookup on the truck, large sacks of rice flour.
Within weeks, those puzzling discoveries would plunge Los Angeles into a whirlwind as a routine fire probe rapidly spun into an international investigation, uncovering a terrorist weapons lab in Mexico and a plan to douse the nation's second-largest city with anthrax and ricin. By the 40th day of the crisis, panic-stricken residents were flooding area hospitals, which buckled under the strain and then reeled as terrorists targeted them as well, poisoning emergency rooms with the same deadly chemicals.
FOR THE RECORD
Terror attack: An article in Monday's Section A about Los Angeles leaders discussing how they would respond to a terrorist attack referred to ricin and anthrax as chemicals. Ricin is a toxic protein, and anthrax is a disease spread by bacterial spores.
That scenario -- all of it hypothetical but built on the actions of real terrorists elsewhere -- was presented at an uncommon gathering last week: Ten of the region's leading public officials and anti-terrorism experts convened at The Times to respond to a simulated attack on Greater Los Angeles, testing their personal mettle and the region's systems for investigating and reacting to a deeply destabilizing threat.
As they did, the participants displayed an openness and cooperation that has not always marked Los Angeles' response to catastrophe. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp. who designed the complex scenario and guided the group through it, praised the participants' instincts, even as he questioned whether some of their choices were influenced by the presence of reporters and cameras.
Still, there was comfort to be taken from the exercise, as the group's members showed command of the vast interagency network constructed in recent years to protect Los Angeles from attack -- even one so chilling and uncontained as that which these panelists faced.
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As investigators sifted through the rubble of a warehouse fire in Carson, their first guess was that they had come upon a drug lab. The men who worked there had paid cash to rent the space, then fled when the fire broke out. But as police and arson investigators took stock of the scene, a few items stuck out. In particular, there was the unusual exhaust system attached to the lunch truck. It did not look like any pipe they had seen, and when they shared their questions with other authorities, they concluded that it resembled a mechanism found at an Al Qaeda weapons lab in Afghanistan.
