Officials: Texas plane crash targeted feds

SUMMARY: A Texas businessman upset with the Internal Revenue Service deliberately crashed his private plane into a multistory office building that houses federal tax employees, authorities said. The pilot was presumed to have died in the crash though his body had not been recovered. At least two people were seriously injured and a third person — a federal employee who worked in the building — was unaccounted for, fire officials said. Joseph Stack, 53, left a message on his company’s web site railing against the IRS and saying “violence is the only answer.’’

STORY LINK: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35460268/ns/us_news-life/

ANALYSIS: Along with the obvious advice to avoid putting your office space in proximity to a potential target such as an IRS facility, this incident put an exclamation point on a week that served to illustrate that you never know when a disaster can strike, or in what form.

This week we have had:

• Numerous hospitals and other organizations exercising some part of their emergency plans because of the weather. Many never considered a snow plan.
• Another example of workplace violence (the item below) where lots of signals were missed by the organization and law enforcement.
• Iran fast tracking a nuclear showdown in the Middle East.
• Continued hacking, showing our computer network vulnerability.
• Visa having around 70,000 accounts compromised, which has not made the news yet. I know because I was one of the people hit and found out because I used to work for a bank and my friends inside told me what happened.
• The Olympics’ opening ceremony being marred by protestors and technical glitches.

All of these events required back-up planning. The question is, who did well, who got burned and who just got lucky because the incident wasn’t more severe or last longer?

--Scott Watkowski, Firestorm franchise principal