It all started today with the fighter jets scrambling outside.

Since 9/11, fighter jets have been one of those cues here in Washington that something might be going on. They’re not particularly loud if you’ve got the air conditioner running, but there’s a sound they make that can be mistaken for nothing else, and there’s something about that sound that triggers a primal feeling of urgency.

Just as our ancestors counted the number of seconds between lightning and thunder, Washingtonians have learned to measure the sound of the jets. One jet, one whoosh, he’s just on his way to Andrews AFB. Several minutes of it, and he’s circling, and you start to wonder why.

So I check my phone to see if there are any emergency text messages from the fine people in the DC government. Then I listen for the absence of dogs barking, or in this case, sirens blaring. There’s a calculus for this as well: one or two sirens are routine police or ambulance issues, medium sirens might be a dignitary and his motorcade, but sustained sirens mean trouble.

Seeing no messages and hearing no sirens, I return to my usual morning routine of catching up on fascinating bulk email. That lasts about 15 minutes, when I get an email from New York pointing me to a Reuters article about the Capitol evacuation. Unfortunately, they overwrite their old wire reports on the web, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it said that people in the Capitol were told to “run away” to Union Station, with no information as to why.

You know that prickly feeling you get in the back of your neck when you’re walking in a dark alley at 2 AM, that says, “maybe I shouldn’t be here?” Turns out, an entire city can feel that way from time to time.

So now I go to DefCon 3, which primarily consists of flipping on the radio and emailing some people near Capitol Hill. And as you probably know, that’s where the news portion of this story ends, since it turned out (at least, according to current news reports) to be two idiots flying a Cessna who understood neither the concept of “no-fly zone” nor the concept of “those fighter jets are not here to welcome you to DC.”

This led to a few thoughts on the nature of terrorism, especially the part of terrorism that means “inducing terror as an end in itself”. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was no threat today, but there was some terror induced nonetheless.

I’m not merely griping here about an inconvenience—these things have real consequences. One guy I wrote today has the authority to tell his entire office to go home. As it happens, it took three minutes between my email alerting him, and my second email with the all-clear. If that had been a longer stretch, this could have shut down their nonprofit for the day. Likewise, the entire DC region (or at least the part that was paying attention) felt their own ripples in their productivity today.

That wasn’t caused by the plane. And it wasn’t caused by the fighter jets. It was caused by the evacuation of Congress and the White House, and the lack of public information explaining whether the rest of us should.

Perhaps it might be useful to give some thought to why an evacuation might be a good idea. Union Station is an excellent place to go, as it happens—a giant marble building with a large underground area, with rail connections to get many people the hell out of Dodge if necessary. But news reports put that Cessna at three miles from the White House, which means at most four miles from the Capitol. That’s two minutes in a Cessna.

Which means that an evacuation is just enough time to move people out of their marble buildings with reinforced basements to put them out in the open. Under what circumstances is this a good idea?

Starting with conventional weapons (and yes, crashing a plane into a building counts as conventional), all you need to do is get people to a safe place. On a short time frame, the basement is usually the best bet provided you don’t expect the building to collapse on top of it. If the basement is hardened, then a collapsing building might even be tolerable provided you have the resources to mount a sizable rescue operation on a short time frame. I would expect that the Capitol and the White House meet both criteria.

If the attack is a small nuclear weapon, really, the most humane thing to do is tell everyone to spend a few minutes emailing their loved ones and making peace with their God. I once did a back-of-the-napkin calculation and determined that a mid-sized nuke (which would fit on a Cessna, although as far as we know only nation-states have access to these) would result in a 75% fatality rate between here and Baltimore. Needless to say, the people at the epicenter do not have that 25% chance.

For biological and chemical (ignoring infectious biological for simplicity’s sake), the rule is “don’t get exposed.” So if you’ve got a Cessna and you’re fearing a crop-duster attachment, the last place you want to put people is on Delaware Avenue NE hoofing it to the train station. Likewise, the train station is less useful in such situations because the first thing you’d need to do is lock down all the trains so they can’t move dangerous agents to other parts of town (or in the case of Amtrak, the country).

So I don’t understand at all the decision to evacuate. It’s more dangerous for the evacuees, and it scares the hell out of everyone else.

And here’s what I further don’t understand. If your goal is to attempt to decrease panic—and there are many good reasons why that should be the goal of the people in charge of emergency preparedness—the best thing you can do is get information out so those of us who live here can make our own decisions. We didn’t hear about the plane until after it was all over; all we heard was the evacuations. But as Reuters is reporting, there have been hundreds of small planes in restricted airspace, and so those of us who pay attention to such things know that this is highly unlikely to be an attack. My all-clear email was before the official announcement, because I sent it when I heard that it was just another small plane piloted by the encephalicly challenged.

On the other hand, Reuters has also pointed out that it’s rare for a plane to invoke a fighter jet response. I trust the people in charge to have done this for a reason, and perhaps it would have been worthwhile to let us know what got them concerned. Perhaps it would also have been worthwhile to do more public education so the rest of the city wouldn’t need to become experts on throwweights and chemical dispersion in order to make a rational choice about how to react to such news.

Instead, we’re told to “be alert to anything out of the ordinary” in a city where extraordinary events occur daily, and when events like this hit the news we have to rely on the national news media to make what might be life-or-death decisions. Because let’s be clear, with any WMD attack, that is exactly what we’re talking about, and the survivors will be the people who react first and react well. That survivability drops if we’re caught up in a mob panic, and an uninformed public is much more likely to create such a panic.

So I’ll close with some open comments to the people involved. To DC Emergency Alerts: an emergency involving the Capitol is an emergency involving Washington as a whole. You’ve been totally silent today, but you sent me an alert about a traffic delay three miles away two weeks ago. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that the federal government didn’t bother to inform you. But I would suggest that you’ve got an obligation to develop your own sources of information, and not just throw your hands up in the air when Uncle Sam acts as you should bloody well expect him to do after all this time. Otherwise, your alert system is nothing more than worthless.

To the agency which scrambled those jets: good show. Your response today seems to be the only thing that did any good and was properly measured.

To whomever is in charge of evacuating Congress: what are you smoking, and where can I get some? It would awfully nice to spend my time in a haze of pleasant optimism and lack of concern about facts or consequences.

And for those at the top… well, really, why do I bother? It’s very nice to know that GWB spent his day biking, and Dick was evacuated to a secure location from his previously secret, presumably insecure location. (And why is the president always biking or reading children’s books when this happens? Is it supposed to be reassuring that the president wasn’t interrupted in his pleasant afternoon? Headline of the future: Los Angeles decimated by nuclear attack; Bush pauses clearing brush, has frosty lemonade.)

Anyway, for those at the top: credit where credit is due for whatever involvement you had on the fighter jet part of today. It’s noted, however, that you cut DC’s emergency response budget (while increasing those budgets for red state towns in sensitive districts), and forced us to use that budget to pay for your inauguration security. It’s noted that not all of our National Guard troops are here at home. It’s noted that the communication from top to bottom in the event of emergency shows the communications efficiency of the Tower of Babel.

But it’s especially noted that most of what you’ve done in the last four years will contribute to ignorant panic on the day that it really hits the fan, or even appears to. On that day, I’ll predict that you’ll see fatalities from mistakes, from fear, from mob action against whomever can’t get out of the way. We could have been—we should be—Londoners during the Blitz, rather than uneducated cattle. Most of the emergency response on 9/11 was from the grassroots—will those same people show up next time, now that they have spent the last four years being made fearful of imaginary WMD?

Yes, it made you very popular in states that weren’t attacked and that have little to fear from terrorism. I hope your bill doesn’t come due. Today was another dunning notice.