New York Subway System Still Vulnerable To Terror Attack

(Analyst's note: Please click on the title to see the troubling video report.)

by By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER and MEGAN CHUCHMACH

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to create a state-of-the-art surveillance system for New York City's subway system, the monitoring technology is still not in place and experts say the city's underground transportation tunnels remain a leading and unnecessarily vulnerable target to terrorism eight years after the 9/11 attacks devastated the country.

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"Terrorists, if they did surveillance, would know that security hasn't really improved since 9/11," said former national security officer Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. After the terrorist attacks, a classified report for NYC's Metropolitan Transit Authority revealed that an explosion and a breach in the many subway tunnels that run under Manhattan's East River could shut down the tunnels for years, which former MTA security official Nick Casale said could result in the loss of thousands of lives.

"The water of the East River would start pouring in and it would not stop," Casale said. "And at some point we would have a catastrophic collapse…the report estimated 19,000 casualties."