Northeast’s Anxiety Level Spikes

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.

On edge from the federal government’s announcement Friday that the nation is at “high risk” for Al Qaeda-related terrorism, U.S. residents from New York to Washington are feeling more anxiety than at any point since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

While the West Coast and other regions may feel removed from the terrorism threat, the Northeast is an island of anxiety. Images that bring renewed uneasiness are everywhere in Washington and New York.

Humvee-mounted antiaircraft missiles are positioned around the nation’s capital for the first time since September, the first anniversary of the attacks, and the Air Force has stepped up patrols.

In New York, posters at police stations warn to keep an eye out for “suitcase bombs.” Some synagogues and Jewish schools, which feel particularly vulnerable, have positioned armed guards outside their doors.

When federal officials on Monday announced a list of materials that every household should have on hand in case of a terrorist 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 radioactive 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 Wednesday. 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 Qaeda is specifically targeting the nation’s financial and political capitals, New York and Washington. That has touched off shopping sprees for hardware and groceries from Virginia to Connecticut and, to a lesser degree, in Massachusetts and Maine.

But in California, “we’re not seeing any spike in demand here, not at all,” said Richard Sauve of GMG Distributors in Oakland, 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.”

Shelley Hughes, spokeswoman for TruServ Corp., which distributes hardware supplies to 6,500 stores, said: “It’s really all in New York, Baltimore, D.C. It’s looking stable in the rest of the country.” Some polling also shows terrorism 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% of the New York and Washington residents surveyed said they had taken one or more precautionary measures, compared with 43% in the nation as a whole. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

A recent Los Angeles Times Poll reported that East Coast residents are willing to give U.S. leaders the most freedom to attack Iraq.

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 the support of the U.N. Security Council.

By contrast, U.N. support was a prerequisite for 79% of Westerners, 66% of Midwesterners and 64% 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.”

In Washington on Wednesday, even some senior government officials admitted to the jitters.

“This is the hardest time in the decade I’ve been here,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). “This is something you fall asleep thinking about. This is something you wake up with.”

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) called on the Bush administration to back its defense-readiness recommendations to Americans with more funding for FBI agents, customs agents and homeland protection.

“I don’t want to minimize whatever recommendations are made to go buy duct tape and buy plastic,” he said. “But I must say, this administration has to do a lot better than that. They have to do a lot more than tell people that the responsibility is now on their shoulders.”

In New York, armed guards and bomb-sniffing dogs appeared over the weekend on the streets near Broadway theaters. Police began checking the trunks of cars parking in nearby garages.

Terrorism alerts, and false alarms, have become daily occurrences: A suspicious package recently shut down one subway line for hours. An anthrax scare at an ESPN office bottled up traffic on the West Side. A swerving white truck caused police to briefly shut down the White- stone Bridge connecting Queens and the Bronx on Wednesday.

“High Anxiety” screamed a recent Daily News headline.

“We know it’s going to happen,” said Anita Warren, a newly arrived New Yorker, who on Wednesday was shopping at the Counter Spy Shop of Mayfair, on Madison Avenue. The store normally sells such high-tech gadgets as secret cameras and eavesdropping devices, but in recent days it has done a brisk business in gas masks and hazardous-materials suits.

“I had to see for myself what this kind of equipment is like, because everybody here is concerned. A lot of people are frightened,” Warren said, inspecting hazmat suits for children and gas masks that cost $498 and more.

Others have gotten jittery over news stories detailing the latest police intelligence briefings.

In one case, police were told to be on the lookout for fire extinguishers and other canisters that might release deadly gases, according to a confidential NYPD memo leaked to the press.

They were also told to keep an eye out for men with “freshly shaved faces,” a possible indication that a beard had recently been shaved off.

“Good luck with that one,” said Julian Cortez, rushing to deliver coffee to a midtown office building. “This stuff can make you crazy.”

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Zitner reported from Washington and Getlin from New York. Times staff writers Janet Hook and Aparna Kumar also contributed to this report.