Egyptian man held in threat to city tunnels (Baltimore)(4 now detained)

Newsday ^ | 18 Oct 2005 | Matthew Dolan and Siobhan Gorman

[piasa]

Interesting - there's supposed to be an Egyptian cleric dropping in to give a lecture at an Islamic center down south of Tampa this week. Picked a bad time to drop into the country.

[montomike]

It all depends on the size of the explosion.

If it was a 10 Megaton nuclear blast, there would be all sorts of complications for the eastern seaboard.

[Rte66]

Those are horrific accounts of the two transalpine tunnel fires--many dead, both tubes turned into 1000+-degree ovens. I can certainly see how deadly a blast can be.

The Baltimore tunnels are 1.5 miles long each. The Euro tunnels were 7 miles and just slightly less, making rescue and recovery impossible; even fighting the fires and repairing the tunnels were nearly impossible. I saw that at least one was still not reopened even two years later.

I still don't quite see what the terror objective would be with the Baltimore tunnels. When both were closed or partially closed, it caused a traffic tie-up for a couple of hours, but that was all.

The horizontalness of the scheme, compared to the verticalness of the WTC, is what has me scratching my head--not a huge "victim impact," as far as I can see.

[Rte66]

*That* I can understand, but what would it take to secretly get into position to do such a thing?

[An.American.Expatriate]

Terrorism does not have "bigger and better" as a goal.

Instead, instilling a feeling of "you are vulnerable, everywhere" and "we control who, what, when, where & how".

I admit, the two tunnels themselves are not the most attractive of targets. However, depending on the size, one or both tunnels could have been significantly damaged/destroyed, thus disrupting for a long period, the flow of traffic along the I-95 corridor.

BTW, both transalpine tunnels have reopened.