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Bomb squads across the country have stopped using communications equipment provided by the FBI in 2003 because many local jurisdictions have been unwilling to pay the monthlyexpenses, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Mar. 28).Half the bomb squads in the Washington, D.C. area cannot use the $12,000 kits, designed to share information about suspected weapons of mass destruction and other possible explosives, because local governments did not assume monthly wireless bills and other maintenance costs first covered by the FBI.“They worked, and it was a good idea until the subscription ran out,” said Mike Love, supervisor of the bomb squad in the Montgomery County, Md., fire department. “There is not budget money for it” in local spending plans, he said.Difficulties affording the bomb squad gear reflected a wider struggle to maintain federally provided security and emergency response equipment as a greater share of its upkeep burden has shifted to state and local levels.Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Washington, D.C. and its surrounding suburbs have received more than $1 billion in federal funding for equipment such as protective suits, satellite telephones, radios and water contamination sensors that many local governments are now struggling to maintain.Washington, D.C.-area officials recently put about $12 million, about one-fifth of the area’s most recent federal homeland security grant, toward maintaining existing equipment over the next two years.Maintenance expenses include $120,000 in new batteries for emergency radios, $400,000 for maintaining river chemical and radiation detectors, and $250,000 in replacement equipment for a videoconferencing system used by high-level officials.In response to warnings that most federal counterterrorism dollars for local jurisdictions could disappear at the end of the decade, state and local governments have begun planning to assume most maintenance expenses for security and emergency response equipment in the next few years (see GSN, July 19).“There's an agreement we're going to start weaning ourselves, such that more and more, we'll pick up” maintenance expenses, said Fairfax County Executive Anthony Griffin, who has led a local committee deciding how to distribute the grants (Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, Aug. 13).As in the days of Noah...
