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Thursday, February 13, 2003

By Aaron Zitner and Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- Barry Frantz finished his regular shift at a Pennsylvania hardware distributor Tuesday night and then drove four hours through a snowstorm to deliver duct tape and batteries to the nation's capital. But that failed to put even the tiniest dent in the region's suddenly ravenous demand for disaster supplies.

Already on edge from the federal government's announcement Friday that the United States is at "high risk" for al-Qaida-related terrorism, residents from New York to Washington are feeling more anxiety than at any point since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Signs of renewed uneasiness are everywhere.

In Washington, Jeep-mounted anti-aircraft missiles are positioned around the city for the first time since last September, the first anniversary of the attacks, and the Air Force has stepped up air patrols.

In New York, posters at police stations warn to keep an eye out for "suitcase bombs." Synagogues and Jewish schools, which feel particularly vulnerable, have boosted security measures; some have even positioned armed guards outside.

When federal officials on Monday announced a list of materials that every household should have on hand in case of a terror attack, hardware stores throughout the Northeast were flooded with alarmed, though not quite panicked, shoppers.

After Frantz made his late-night delivery Tuesday to Strosniders Hardware in Bethesda, Md., just north of Washington, the store still had 6,000 rolls of duct tape on back order. Customers had already bought 3,000 rolls in recent days, compared with about 70 in a typical month.

"The numbers are just crazy, just off the charts for us," said Bill Hart, the store's general manager. "We've sold in the past day what we usually sell in a year."

Shoppers are stripping stores of flashlights, blankets, can openers, Sterno canned fuel and battery-powered radios. Duct tape and plastic sheeting are also in short supply because federal officials, in their Monday announcement, recommended that families pick a room and keep materials on hand to seal its cracks and vents in case of biological, chemical or radiation attack.

They also recommended that families stock a three-day supply of food and water. Several Washington-area stores were sold out of bottled water yesterday. After customers bought out Strosniders' entire supply of water containers, Hart said, they started buying clothes-storage boxes to hold water.

While the government's preparedness message applies to the whole country, federal officials said they believe that al-Qaida is specifically targeting the financial and political capitals, New York and Washington. That has touched off hardware- and grocery-shopping sprees from Virginia to Connecticut and, to a lesser degree, in Massachusetts and Maine.

But the Northeast is an island of anxiety, as much of the rest of the nation feels removed from the terror threat.

"We're not seeing any spike in demand here, not at all," said Richard Sauve of GMG Distributors in Oakland, Calif., which sends hardware supplies to Northern California stores. "It's probably the reverse of what happens when we've got a little earthquake, and the East doesn't react."

"It's really all in New York, Baltimore, D.C. It's looking stable in the rest of the country," said Shelley Hughes, spokeswoman for TruServ Corp., which distributes hardware supplies to 6,500 stores.

Some polling also shows terror anxiety to be higher in New York and the mid-Atlantic region than elsewhere. When the Pew Research Center surveyed 1,800 Americans in August, New York and Washington residents reported in high numbers that they were traveling less by air, avoiding public events and handling mail differently.

At least 60 percent of the New York and Washington residents surveyed said they had taken one or more precautionary measures, compared with 43 percent in the nation as a whole. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

At the same time, East Coast residents are willing to give U.S. leaders the most freedom to attack Iraq, a recent Los Angeles Times Poll reported.

In the survey of 809 people, conducted Friday and Saturday, only half the people surveyed in mid-Atlantic and New England states said the United States should take military action against Iraq only with support of the United Nations Security Council.

By contrast, U.N. support was a prerequisite for 79 percent of Westerners, 66 percent of Midwesterners and 64 percent of Southerners. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

"There's no question but that the immediacy of the 9/11 attack had a profound impact" from Washington to New England, said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former general counsel to the CIA, who is now dean of the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. "But I think also there's been a great deal more written and discussed on the East Coast about what we're grappling with than you see elsewhere. You really do breathe it in the Washington-New York corridor. It's a much greater involvement with foreign policy, generally."