Color-coded alert: Fade to black

[coffeeseven]

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2008/11/30/a18a_moffettcol_1130.html

Sunday, November 30, 2008

I was clinging to the faint hope that the Department of Homeland Security might drop the nation to Code Blue for the holiday weekend and relieve the prolonged angst and drudgery of life under Code Yellow.

Americans have been dealing with the color-coded alert system for close to six years. It was supposed to give citizens and law enforcement officials a common reference point to assess the risk of a terrorist attack. Instead, it became a tool the Bush administration used to stoke fears before the 2004 elections and a hype-line Fox News used to open its reports: "Good morning, America, the nation is under Code Orange threat of terrorist attack today."

But it became clear that the color-coded system had outlived its usefulness when Fox began ignoring it like everyone else.

Now you can go weeks at a time without hearing a reference to the daily terror color. Still, Homeland Security dutifully posts the alert on its Web site and offers it in recorded phone greetings. Yellow has been the color for this holiday weekend; there is an elevated, significant risk of terror attack. Personally, I'm unable to ramp my adrenaline up beyond Blue feelings of a guarded, general risk of terrorist attack. I promise to try harder.

To say that the government's system is vague and ambiguous is true but misses the point. Its irrelevance is worse.

Trying to assess the net risk over some 3.8 million square miles is as futile as trying to come up with a national weather forecast. If this were Belgium, one size might fit all. But who really believes that Boise, Idaho, and Slicklizzard, Ala., and Ocala and Washington, D.C., are equally imperiled? Yet the system colors them all Yellow.

From what we've been told about Anchorage, Alaska, in recent weeks, the city must deserve a Blue ranking, perhaps even a low-risk Green. Yet DHS says it's as Yellow as Los Angeles.

New York City has been rated Code Orange since 9/11. There is an imaginary line somewhere as you leave Manhattan where the color changes to Yellow. You won't see it, but the theory is that you should feel your blood pressure drop as you exit Orange.

DHS also gave the nation's airports a Code Orange rating for the holiday weekend, which means that as you drive up to catch your flight you should experience a surge in blood pressure and heart rate as you exit Yellow. But it's easy to mistake your hostility against the airlines for true government-certified, color-coded risk anxiety, so by all means, take care.

In theory, Crayola should run the system. Let the color experts refine risk assessment in shades of henna, cerise, burnt sienna and inchworm. Make Miami mango tango and St. Louis unmellow yellow. Anchorage might get the happily-ever-after blue it deserves.

There's a good argument that DHS should scrap color coding altogether and rate the states 1 to 50, perhaps on a computer point system similar to college football's Bowl Championship Series. It at least would give Florida the chance to rank higher than Mississippi in something.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who helped create the color-coded alerts, acknowledged years ago that the system was imperfect. Mr. Ridge said it would invoke second-guessing and "questions, even occasional derision." He offered no remedy, however, largely because there isn't one.

The idea of color-coding terror is an anachronism from the Bush administration that deserves to vanish in January. Not that anyone will notice.