Elmont Online

NEW YORK -- It's the morning rush in the Times Square subway station, a routine convergence of humanity and mass transit that makes New York City hum. Mixing seamlessly with subway riders are New York Police Department officers with heavy body armor and high-powered rifles, commanders in blue NYPD polo shirts carrying smart phone-size radiation detectors and a panting police dog named Sabu.

"This is the new normal," Inspector Scott Shanley of the NYPD's Counterterrorism Division says. "The only people who sometimes get raised up are tourists."

Since terrorists brought down the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, subways have been bombed in terror attacks across the world, including in Madrid, London and this spring in Minsk, Belarus. The possibility that New York's sprawling, porous and famously gritty subway system could be next has become a constant worry -- leading to a new normal of suspicious package alerts, bomb-sniffing dogs, cameras trained on commuters and passengers listening to the missive, "if you see something, say something."

The campaigns encouraging residents to report suspicious activity strike Manhattan writer Anne Nelson, 57, as Orwellian.

"New York is about expression and life and vibrancy," she said, walking through Times Square. "It's not about living in an atmosphere of fear."

But authorities here believe a serious attack on the 24-hour subway system with more than 400 stations would potentially cripple the city in ways worse than the Sept. 11 attack -- a concern shared by U.S. cities and countries reliant on mass transit and viewed as enemies by terrorists.

New York's subway system, the largest in the country, has more than 465 far-flung stations, most with multiple entrances, and 800 miles of track that would stretch to Chicago if laid end to end. Last year, it carried 5.2 million riders on the average weekday -- more than double the number of travelers who pass through U.S. airports each day.

"It's really a potentially very vulnerable environment -- one that you can't totally protect," said William Bratton, a security firm executive who's headed New York and Los Angeles' police departments and was chief of the New York City transit police.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said the NYPD tries to meet that challenge by going to "extraordinary lengths" in the subways "to make our presence seen and felt in different ways, giving would-be terrorists and common criminals cause to think twice."

Officers have been given training in how to spot terror suspects casing the subways. They've also been instructed to be on the alert for people walking in a stiff manner, sweating heavily and talking to themselves -- signs of a potential suicide bomber.

The counterterror arsenal includes more than 30 bomb-sniffing dogs; silent alarms and motion detectors to prevent tampering with ventilation systems to make a chemical or biological attack more lethal; and a vast system of security cameras wired with live feeds from Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal and Herald Square.