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WASHINGTON -- Public health emergencies don't strike like a nuclear missile, but they still require a similar "war room" to prepare for, respond to and manage emergencies.
Such a room exists, tucked inside the sixth floor of the concrete Humphrey Building in downtown Washington. It's what you would expect from the movies: walls of televisions, satellite photo screens, and rows of computers with an alphabet soup of agency acronyms. And it's all just 15 steps from the office of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt.
The official name is the Secretary's Operations Center, but everyone calls it the SOC (pronounced "sock").
Nearly 3 years old, the $3.7 million room is praised by agency officials as integral in responding to the health crisis after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf states.
"Having access to information was vital," Leavitt, Utah's former governor, said in a brief interview inside the SOC. "I can only imagine what [the response] would have been like without all of this."
The so-called "nerve center" of the HHS Department is impressive in its ability to provide information. A 7-foot-high, 24-foot-wide video wall can display any image from computers, cameras and satellites. On a recent visit, the wall, split into 10 different screens, showed...