Senators eye halting future scares

Monday, Feb. 23, 1998 | 10:04 a.m.

In the wake of the Southern Nevada anthrax scare, Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Pete Dominici, D-N.M., were to tour the Nevada Test Site today to study the area as a future counter-terrorism center to train emergency-response teams.

Reid and his staff have met with the FBI and the Defense Department in recent months detailing the need for such a center. The Test Site offers a maze of underground tunnels that would allow an elite team to practice how to contain toxic fumes in a subway.

Larry Wayne Harris, one of two men arrested in Henderson last week in connection with the anthrax scare, said last summer that he planned to place a "globe" of bubonic plague in a New York subway station and kill hundreds of thousands, according to a complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court.

Dominici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Committee, and Reid, ranking member of the subcommittee, will review the Department of Energy's budget for the national nuclear-weapons stockpile program.

Reid secured $5 million for emergency-crew training at the Test Site this year and worked toward obtaining $20 million to pay for counter-terrorism programs nationwide.

Reid said the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the ideal place for experimenting with counter-terrorism techniques.

"This kind of training is key in situations such as the potential anthrax testing which happened this weekend," Reid said.

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