Firms Securing Positions on the Homeland Front
Almost four decades ago, Tetra Tech Inc. was founded as a marine engineering firm with a contract from the Defense Department. Its mission: to measure the effect that an offshore nuclear blast would have on wave motion at the California coastline.
The Pasadena-based company obviously didn’t set off an atomic bomb to measure the ocean’s churn. Instead, it used the mathematical calculations of one of its engineers, Li-San Hwang of nearby Caltech, to help shape the Pentagon’s plans.
Many years later, Tetra Tech -- along with countless other firms -- is poised to catch that wave again: business related to safeguarding America. But today, with the U.S. on the verge of war with Iraq and the threat of terrorism inside the nation’s borders looming large, the situation is even more intense.
“We are Mt. Everest and the wind blows from everywhere,” says Hwang, who is now Tetra Tech’s chairman and chief executive. In other countries, such as Hwang’s native Taiwan, strategic facilities such as water reservoirs and transportation systems always have been protected. “Now we in America must assess the threats and decide how to protect against them,” he says.
Indeed, while much of U.S. industry is stalled in the anxious wait before possible war, many companies are working overtime and gearing up to bid for the avalanche of business expected from homeland security efforts.
The new Department of Homeland Security is just organizing itself. Very little of its $36-billion-plus budget has been disbursed at this point. But Defense Department funds already are flowing. And so, too, are private dollars.
“Corporations may have slashed their information technology budgets, but CEOs are spending the money to protect their systems form cyberterrorism,” notes Gordon Adams, Western states general manager for computer consultant Electronic Data Systems Corp.
Homeland security can take many forms -- from hardware to software, from guards and guns to teaching and training.
Companies that make high-tech hardware for the military, such as Irvine Sensors Corp. of Costa Mesa and Quintessance Photonics Corp. of Sylmar, are confident that their specialized products will find new applications in a post-Sept. 11 world.
Meanwhile, the USC School of Engineering has taken in some $50 million from the Defense Department this year for work at its new Center for Research on Unexpected Events -- its homely but accurate name for a program devoted to teaching major corporations such as Northrop Grumman Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. how to counter terror attacks.
For its part, El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. has just hired a former top FBI official to head its Information Assurance Strategic Initiative, its homeland security program. Boeing Co. has snared a $1.3-billion contract to help protect more than 200 airports around the nation. And Lockheed Martin Corp. has a similar-sized contract for screening airline passengers.
Neil Martau, head of business development for Inter-Con Security Systems Inc., a Pasadena-based company with 25,000 employees that guards State Department properties here and abroad, points out that local governments are confronting the fact that federal authorities are requiring police and fire personnel to have chemical and bioterrorism training. In turn, he explains, cities and states are looking to Uncle Sam to foot the bill for such training.
That’s one big reason the budget for the Department of Homeland Security is expected to soar to $100 billion within five years, says John Ellison, a former professor at the Pentagon’s National Defense University who has started a new business, Sentinel Security Services, with former military officers in the Los Angeles area.
The key question is whether companies desperate for business are just latching on to the latest craze? Is homeland security a long-term proposition or a fad?
In many eyes, the answer is clear: This is a trend for the long term.
“Until now, our military forces all have been focused on defending the nation against external threats,” says Ellison. “But now the U.S. Army has set up a Northern Command for the internal defense of the United States. They haven’t staffed it yet, but they will.”
It is this reality that is driving Tetra Tech, which now boasts more than $1 billion in revenue and sees rapid growth ahead.
The company has created and manages the command and control center for Capitol Hill in Washington, a complex of computing and electronic surveillance that monitors 27,000 movements a day in the Capitol and adjacent Senate and House Office buildings. In late 2001, it was Tetra Tech that detected anthrax in a suspicious envelope delivered to the office of Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
These days, Hwang is focused on another area -- water.
“Pipelines, carrying supplies to large communities like New York, those are vulnerable,” he says, “and will have to be protected constantly.”
Americans always have taken their safety for granted. A new industry is being born because they no longer can.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@ latimes.com.
