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Pizza deliveries face a whole new set of hurdles

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

By Jack Kelly, Post-Gazette National Security Writer

People didn't used to call the police about suspicious tomato sauce.

Over the past year, local companies have practiced building evacuations, emergency workers have conducted regular catastrophe drills, bike messengers have grown accustomed to showing I.D., and the Coast Guard has started checking bridges for bombs.

But perhaps the greatest change in security locally since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago has been increased popular awareness of potential threats, according to police and security officials.

An example: the barrage of calls to the Pittsburgh Police Department this summer when a company left samples of spaghetti sauce on porches in Oakland.

"We were getting one 911 call after another," recalled Nate Harper, the department's assistant chief of operations.

Security is certainly taken more seriously at office buildings, especially government offices. "They've tightened up security for messengers," said Chris Bobnar, president of Jet Messenger. "You need a valid [driver's] license for most buildings."

"Sometimes people don't want you to put a pizza on a desk because they think it's a bomb," said Christian Meneske, who delivers pizzas for Papa John's in Oakland.

Paul Lazzaro, owner of the Monte Cello's franchise on Seventh Avenue, said, "You have to have a clearance to take lunch to someone. A lot of times the delivery people are not allowed to go up to the upper floors. People have to go downstairs to pick up their lunch."

Security firms report a substantial increase in business, especially to protect public buildings. One reason is that security was better at private corporations before Sept. 11.

"Our business now is more than double what it was last year," said Joanne Reynolds, human resources manager for Am-Gard of Sharpsburg. "All the public buildings have added security."

The Port Authority of Allegheny County now provides security 24 hours a day, seven days a week at its Downtown subway stations.

"We've had to hire six new police officers," said Port Authority spokesman Bob Grove. "We now have a level of contact with local, state and federal agencies which did not exist prior to 9/11."

Katie Bohnke, branch manager for Guardsmark, said she had 30 people on the payroll in the Pittsburgh office before Sept. 11; she has 85 now.

The main change in security at PNC Park since Sept. 11 is that parking is forbidden along nearby curbs, said Pirates spokesman Pat O'Connell. "There wasn't much else to do," he said. "We were a pretty tight ballpark before."

Emergency response procedures at Carnegie-Mellon University have been completely reworked since Sept. 11. At the University of Pittsburgh, patrols by the campus police have been increased, and ID card reader systems have been upgraded.

After Sept. 11, each of the 19 UPMC hospitals checked their plans for physical security. But UPMC's primary focus has been on protecting everyone else from biological attack. The University of Pittsburgh, in cooperation with CMU, runs the Biomedical Security Institute, a national center that researches how to detect and fight biological attacks.

"The big problem in bioterrorism is detection," said Dr. Michael Allswede, associate professor of emergency medicine.

The Center for Biomedical Informatics at Pitt has developed the Real Time Outbreak Detection System (RODS), which detects patterns of illness and compares them with normal outbreaks of things like the flu to look for unusual occurrences. President Bush came to see a demonstration of the system Feb. 10.

Another Pittsburgh-based national resource in the war on terror is the Computer Emergency Response Team at CMU. CERT studies cyber vulnerabilities and advises businesses, government agencies and individuals on computer security.

The Biomedical Security Institute is a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, not the UPMC Health System. Also, the Real Time Outbreak Detection System was developed by the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Pitt, not by the Biomedical Security Institute. In a story on beefed-up security since Sept. 11 in yesterday's editions, we misstated both facts.