Six years after Sept. 11, Illinois ready for disaster
The last time Sept. 11 fell on a Tuesday, Col. Jill Morgenthaler was driving to work at Argonne National Laboratories when she learned of the first strike on the World Trade Center on the radio.
Like many, she believed at first that it was a terrible accident. But when the second plane hit, she knew the nation was at war and that her own life would change.
The Des Plaines woman soon received a call from her school-aged son, anxious that this wasn't a good day for his mom to be a soldier.
But she told him otherwise.
"Today is a very good day to be a soldier," she said. "This is what I spent my life preparing for. I'm going to keep you safe."
Six years later, Morgenthaler's job is to keep the entire state safe as Gov. Rod Blagojevich's deputy chief of staff for public safety and his homeland security adviser.
Her current job follows both her recent time as head of public affairs for the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq, as well as her civilian work as manager of the Emergency Response Center at Argonne National Laboratories.
Speaking to the Schaumburg Business Association Tuesday morning, she told of the high level of preparedness Illinois has achieved, as well as her goals for continued improvement.
Advances in communications and information cross-sharing allow law enforcement agencies to quickly learn from each other, including if someone has been bragging about illicit activities on a MySpace page.
"I love stupid criminals," Morgenthaler laughed. "They make my job so much easier. It's the smart ones I worry about."
The leadership role Illinois emergency workers took in the response to Hurricane Katrina was a good measure of the state's level of sophistication in disaster relief, Morgenthaler said.
And the state does have reasons of its own to be vigilant, she added. Illinois has the most nuclear reactors in the U.S. and, as a transportation hub, is third in the world for container movements.
However, the presence of terrorism in the state has largely taken the form of money laundering, she said.
Mother Nature is still the state's biggest enemy in terms of emergency response, as evidenced by last month's storms.
Morgenthaler's goal for this year is to maintain the state's high standards and complete an evacuation plan for Chicago. The plan is already up to the task of getting a million people out of the city, but she would like to identify places to house 100,000 of them who might have nowhere else to go. She believes locations in the collar counties would be ideal.
She believes the biggest mistake terrorists have made is underestimating the country and not understanding that beneath the skins of its various ethnic groups beat the hearts of true Americans.
"Our enemies think they know America," Morgenthaler said. "They look at our generous nature and mistake that for weakness. They shake our soft hands and don't realize that underneath that there is steel."