FEMA Disaster Drill This Week

No amount of kitty treats can make up for doing this photo shoot.

Hold on to your tin foil hats folks because all this week (Monday through Friday) FEMA will be conducting a terrorism drill -- a fact not lost on conspiracy nuts who believe that the government had prior knowledge of 9/11 because FEMA had planned on 9/12 to conduct a biological-terrorism drill in a commercial warehouse on the Hudson and already had personnel in place on 9/10 in New York. Right. /s

Here's the gist of this week's operation from the FEMA press release:

FEMA's National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) is scheduled for July 27 through July 31, 2009. NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery.

The NLE 09 scenario will begin in the aftermath of a notional [theoretical] terrorist event outside of the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure.

NLE 09 will be an operations-based exercise to include: activities taking place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and potential field locations to include federal headquarters facilities in the Washington D.C. area, and in federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector facilities in FEMA Region VI, which includes the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and California.

Now, the only thing that I find odd about this report is that FEMA Region VI does not include California. Unfortunate wording, but likely a fact not lost on the tin foil hat crowd either.

Other than that folks, nothing out of the ordinary. There will be no dirty bomb explosion happening in Mexico this week. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Of course, if you don't believe me, you can always contact the FEMA News Desk: 202-646-4600. I'm sure they're trained to handle all types of calls.