Mayor Harvey Hall and city officials want to assure that they are ready for any violent attacks against the Southern San Joaquin Valley.
Hall, with Chief of Police Eric Matlock and Fire Chief Ron Fraze, met with City Manager Alan Tandy shortly after the initial attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
At a Tuesday press conference on the steps of the City Council Chambers, Hall said that the city and county emergency officials had prepared the Emergency Operation Center. All three emphasized that the center was ready but not enabled.
Meanwhile, Matlock said that he had been in communication with federal and state law enforcement agencies and had kept his eye on intelligence matters within the city.
Both Matlock and Hall said separately that there had been no influx of 911 calls or emergency needs and that all service calls were normal Tuesday morning.
Fraze commented that no prank calls or false alarms were called in to the departments.
“The fire department has alerted its personnel to the possibility of assisting other cities under the state’s ‘Master Mutual Aid Plan,’ should the need arise,” Hall added.
The mayor said that city officials are adamant about helping agencies in New York and Washington, D.C. Hall announced that three officials from the fire department would travel to New York to assist in recovery efforts and investigation endeavors.
“This tragedy will stretch across America when you consider … the people that have been injured in New York and Washington, D.C. along with those persons that perished in the four airplane crashes. Those will have reaching effects to our city, perhaps, and certainly to other parts of the United States,” Hall said.
For now security at city and county offices is heightened. Hall said the chief administrative officer was increasing security in buildings like the county courts building.
Meadows Field, the county’s main airport, was shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration along with the nearly 1,500 other international and regional airports.
Ray Bishop, Kern County director of airports, said that the closing was in response to uncertainties about safety in the air.
“The air above the airport is closed and it’s not only Meadows Field, it’s all the airports,” said Bishop. “I am responsible for all the airports in our county and all county airports are closed.”
Bishop wasn’t sure about how long the airports would be closed. On Wednesday, FAA officials were evaluating re-opening the nation’s air transport system.
Most public places around the city remained open Tuesday. Some exceptions included California State University, Bakersfield, which closed offices at noon to employees; East Hills Mall; and Valley Plaza owned by General Growth Properties in Chicago, closed the mall “out of respect,” said Marcella Anthony, marketing director for Valley Plaza. BC made the decision to stay open, but President Sandra Serrano distributed an employee memorandum about the events of the day saying in part that “as an education institution, BC has a responsibility to help students learn from such events.”
The memo continued asking all employees to “be sensitive to the individual needs” of the students.
The next day, Serrano said that the events of Tuesday were hard on her and the whole campus.
“It wasn’t business as usual,” she said. “We were all affected. I went home drained.”
With all the happenings of the day, many people in city and county administration have a hard time believing this type of catastrophe could happen on U.S. soil.
“This makes me mad because I’d like to know who did this and why,” Bishop said. “But the problem with terrorist attacks is that they are intermingled with good people … it makes it hard (to point them out).”
Chief Matlock was just as upset.
“It tugs at my heart for the careless disregard for human life.”