Inch Of Snow Shuts Down Air Marshalls

Wow.

The Washington Times – Hundreds of federal air marshals were grounded and unable to access critical information to pinpoint potential terrorist activity for eight hours on the eve of President Bush’s inauguration after snow paralyzed the Mission Operations Center in Washington, said several air marshals and a supervisor.
The marshals said they could not reach the Mission Operations Center (MOC) by telephone to be placed on other flights after hundreds of flights were rerouted because of the snow, and marshals seeking information on reports of a dirty bomb in Boston were unsuccessful.
“They were flying blind,” said the supervisor, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “An inch of snow shut down the Federal Air Marshals system’s [ability] to gather, receive or request information.”
“It basically put the entire aviation security system and flying public at risk because the air marshals were not able to properly do their jobs,” the supervisor said.
The supervisor said MOC sent out a message at about 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday that the “system was shut down and they were not answering phones or anything” because they did not have enough staff working.
“Guys were literally stuck all over the U.S., and the problem is that when we see suspicious activity and need to check names against the watch list, no one was even available for an eight-hour period,” the supervisor said.
Dave Adams, spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said marshals were told not to call MOC unless their flights were canceled, but that it was operating and properly staffed. He said it is “understood” calls concerning suspicious activity could be made to MOC.
“We had a significant amount of people to handle over 551 schedule changes due to inclement weather, based on airline changes,” Mr. Adams said.

Inclement weather? It was an inch of snow! If we shut down things up here in North Dakota for an inch of snow we wouldn’t be coming out of our houses from October to April. And remember, with the type of wind our state gets an inch of snow means “blizzard,” yet we manage to keep our phone lines operational.
This is nothing short of disturbing. I’m thinking an investigation into the infrastructure of the Air Marshall’s department is certainly warranted at this point.
Via Michelle Malkin, who has more commentary and links.