Some guy dumped five ounces of mercury onto the platform at the Pershing Square MTA station three days before Christmas, triggering a HAZMAT cleanup and ensuing paroxysm of finger-pointing, name-calling and self-flagellation among the Homeland Security and MTA brass.
As anyone who's busted a thermometer or goofed around mercury in high school chemistry class can tell you, the liquid-metal neurotoxin won't actually hurt you unless you're dumb enough to swallow it or rub it into your skin ...
But whether it was ricin, anthrax, nitroglycerin or Mountain Blast POWERade, the crime here wasn't in the material or the way the guy dumped it and then confessed via an MTA call-box.
It was in the 8-hour delay between the report and the MTA calling in the Sheriff's HAZMAT team to check it out, and in the authorities' inability - to this day - to tell whether the spill was accidental or intentional. Do passengers have a responsibility to report suspicious-looking activities like this? Sure - eternal vigilance is one of the prices we have to pay in the atmosphere of heightened paranoia and terrorist threat brought on by the administration's misadventures in Iraq.
But is that our job? Nope. It's the job of the MTA and the authorities - who have since stepped up undercover patrols. Wonder where they'll be caught napping next? We'd better hope it's not somewhere targeted by real, live terrorists.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 04:12 PM
