Imagine a world where in the middle of Westwood, California, surrounded by houses inhabited by regular people, on a small hill, with neighborhood streets coming from different sides but one that was a ravine, imagine that there stud the White House: no fences, no buffer lawn surrounding it, no military presence or secret service, at least not in view, deployed; Just the house and personnel to serve the People. That was my dream. And I happened to work inside.
The president was Bill Clinton. Yup, that charismatic, smart, eloquent young Bill Clinton (I was just my actual self), and in the day in question, there was a threat of terrorist attack against the White House. The terrorist’s plan was to make a huge water tank that was located higher in the neighborhood to release the water all at once. Due to the gradient and path, it would mean that the water in its wrath would take down the White House. Why not simply a car bomb? Or a sniper against the President? Or whatever in such an unprotected place? I don’t know, but this is my dream so don’t interrupt it.
It so happened that the president gave the evacuation order and permission for everyone to go home, except “skeleton” personnel to keep essential operations. Everybody started walking down the evacuation stairs, including mister Clinton who was calmly going down together with everyone else. The stairs were tubular similar to the metal emergency stairs outside of buildings, but wider, after all, it was the White House. They were on both sides of the hill.
When we got to the street, people started going home as ordered, but I remained (was I part of the skeleton personnel? Or just had to stay so the dream could continue?). At that point the President noted that his personal secretary stayed, he walked to her and asked: What are you doing here?
From where we were standing you could see the White House on top of the hill with the ravine to the right, our place of work, the symbol of democracy. And then the water came down and inundated it. The terrorist plan wasn’t that bad after all. Not that we had it unprotected, nor didn’t try to stop the attack, nor was it built in that place, to begin with. There was a lot of damage that we could see, especially by the ravine side, but for us standing there, where somehow the water didn’t go even though we were at a lower ground, was not an option.
So, the IT guys were called, they recovered all the equipment and data that they could from the remains of the White House and went on installing the whole system in some other place so the government could continue.
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