The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MARGARET WARNER: Good evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight, a major drug bust involving American Airlines; lessons for the U.S. in the Turkish quake; a Chicago suburb's effort to evict youth gangs; and a David Gergen dialogue with educators Theodore and Nancy Sizer, authors of "The Students are Watching." It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

MARGARET WARNER: Federal agents arrested dozens of American Airlines employees and contract workers today and charged them with being part of a massive drug smuggling operation involving the airline's planes. The arrests were the result of two sting operations, code-named Operation Ramp Rats and Operation Sky Chef, at Miami International Airport. Most of the 58 people indicted were employees of American airlines or meal service provider, Sky Chefs, a subsidiary of Germany's Lufthansa Airlines. The ring did not include any pilots or flight attendants. Customs director Raymond Kelly spoke in Washington.

RAYMOND KELLY: Unfortunately, the airlines operate under certain constraints. They cannot scrutinize employees' backgrounds as thoroughly as necessary. In addition, some of the suspects in this case were contract employees of the airlines and not subject to the same hiring practices that regular employees might undergo. We need to reexamine the weaknesses inherent in these conditions and redouble our efforts to eliminate them.

MARGARET WARNER: We'll hear more from Customs Chief Kelly right after the News Summary. In economic news today, the Commerce Department said orders for big-ticket manufactured items, so-called durable goods, jumped an unexpected 3.3 percent last month to $204 billion. The report showed high demand for industrial goods like computers and machine tools, as well as electronic equipment. A good day on Wall Street followed that news. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at another record high, up 42 points at 11,326. The NASDAQ Index was up 53 points to close at 2805. Turkish officials revised the earthquake death toll downward to 12,594, 5,000 fewer than yesterday. The prime minister blamed a local official in the town of Izmit for issuing misleading data. Recovery workers found the bodies of an American contractor and his Taiwanese wife. They died in the collapse of their apartment building. It was the sixth American fatality. A second day of rain soaked the 200,000 people left homeless by last week's quake. Bulldozers continued to clear wreckage as rescue teams abandoned their search for survivors. We'll have more on the earthquake story later in the program. Three tropical storms-- Dennis, Cindy and Emily-- gained strength today, threatening the Caribbean and the United States. Forecasters expect Dennis to grow into a hurricane by Wednesday evening and possibly hit the East Coast this weekend. Cindy churned around the Atlantic with 65 mile-an-hour winds and no clear destination. Emily was moving slowly toward Barbados, but was still 300 miles away. Richard Holbrooke was sworn in today as the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It was a private, low-profile ceremony at the U.S. Mission in New York. A more formal swearing-in is planned after Labor Day. Holbrooke will leave Friday for Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia. Overseas today, Austrian police arrested the chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army on war crimes charges. General Momir Talic was seized while attending a military conference in Vienna, apparently unaware that he'd been secretly indicted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal. He's the highest ranking Serb officer to be arrested on such an indictment. He is charged with directing the purge of Croats and Muslims from Bosnia in 1992. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the drug sting at American Airlines; quake-proof construction; an anti-gang law in Illinois; and a David Gergen dialogue.

FOCUS - OPERATION RAMP RAT

MARGARET WARNER: We lead tonight with the drug bust story. Kwame Holman begins.

KWAME HOLMAN: Authorities began rounding up American Airlines baggage and food service workers before dawn...climaxing a two-year, two-part investigation dubbed "Operation Ramp Rats" and "Operation Sky Chefs." The raid centered on Miami International Airport, which the FBI says was the nucleus of an international smuggling ring. The multi law enforcement agency task force used buses to transport the dozens of suspects in what one official said was the largest airport drug bust in history. The U.S. Attorney in Miami, Thomas Scott, spoke to reporters early this afternoon.

THOMAS SCOTT: The employees that were involved in this case in the takedown today consisted of 58 individuals: 30 of them were employees of American Airlines; 13 were employees of Lufthansa Sky Chef. Three of them were state or federal law enforcement people, one from the INS, one from the Broward Sheriff's Office and one from the United States Department of Agriculture who were charged. The other individuals were laypeople involved in this. And this operation and six of these individuals will be charged, by the way, in New York because of the distribution.

KWAME HOLMAN: Scott described how authorities became suspicious.

THOMAS SCOTT: And I think you'll recall from the newspapers the situation where there was an American Airlines flight where heroin was literally found in coffee packages that had been placed on the airplane in Colombia and flown here and literally the investigation revealed that the pilot of the plane, when he began to drink the coffee, said, "There's a distinct taste, it's sortof weak." And when they went back and investigated it, they found that there was heroin in the packages. Based upon that, it became obvious to law enforcement officers in April that either Sky Chef or American was involved in the distribution of cocaine.

KWAME HOLMAN: Scott said police soon uncovered a busy smuggling operation, with tentacles reaching from South America through the Eastern United States. Scott illustrated one of several schemes.

THOMAS SCOTT: Here you can literally see an American employee in uniform at the Denny's near the airport receiving the cocaine. He then enters the airport in his uniform. Notice that the backpack-- the employees carry backpacks and this is for obviously things that they need on the ramps -- but it's also the way the cocaine and the contraband is also carried, in these backpacks. And here they literally enter the airport. They then use their security pass to go down into the secured areas, bypassing the metal detectors, bypassing the security and then end up in a secured area by the gate. And here you can see literally the American Airlines employee with the bag, passing the cocaine to the individual who will then take it to the northeastern city. I want to repeat something, if I haven't said it, but let me say this to you: In many of these transactions, these individuals were not supposed to be at the airport. They were not working that day. They had come to the airport literally to perform criminal conduct utilizing their security passes, utilizing their uniforms in order to bypass security, bypass the laws of the United States and take contraband onto these airplanes.

KWAME HOLMAN: Agents said they learned the suspects were willing to smuggle anything for a price. In one case, charging undercover agents $7,000 to smuggle a dummy hand grenade aboard a domestic American Airlines flight. Patricia Galupo is an agent with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

PATRICIA GALUPO, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms: Can you imagine when you're loading up the family and the kids, you're going to Disney World, you're going to go on an American Airlines flight, and you're all competing for that very precious cargo overhead space above your seat. And when you're going down that aisle and trying to find your seat and you're putting your bag up with your tennis racquet and your kids' toys, you're competing with this. I mean this is what these guys carried onboard this aircraft.

KWAME HOLMAN: American Airlines officials were aware of the undercover operation from the very early stages and cooperated in it. The airline's chief of security spoke to reporters in Miami this morning.

LARRY WANSLEY, Security Director, American Airlines: These arrests are having no impact on our operation. Most of the arrests took place at the individuals' homes. While we are disturbed that a small group of employees were part of this smuggling ring, their activities have been under surveillance by the federal government and the company departments for quite some time. This is a company with zero tolerance for illegal drugs. We will continue our cooperative efforts with the officials of the various agencies to stem the tide of illegal drugs.

MARGARET WARNER: Sky Chefs officials did not offer comment on the news. For more now, we're joined by the Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service, Raymond Kelly, whose agency played a major role in the Miami investigation.

Welcome, Commissioner Kelly. It seems incredible that two rings with all of these people could be operating so freely at a major airport like Miami. I mean, one of the pictures we saw they were approaching an open plane, the cargo hold, walking on, getting a bag, taking it away. I mean, how do you explain that, that no one ever detected them?

RAYMOND KELLY, Commissioner, U.S. Customs Service: Difficult to explain. I thought the U.S. Attorney Tom Scott did a real fine job today outlining that accessibility, the availability that they had to aircraft. These were people, as he said, who were not working and clearly, it calls for a lot more controls, a lot more monitoring of the employees...a whole series of initiatives that have to be put in place.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Before we get to that, tell me about these two smuggling rings, Sky Chef's and the American Airlines. First of all, were they in cahoots?

RAYMOND KELLY: The Sky Chef employees and the American Airlines, to the best of my knowledge, didn't know each other, weren't interacting. The American employees were, in essence, low-level employees, baggage handlers, warehouse guards, security personnel, and what they were doing was actually allowing drugs to come in by baggage means and then circumventing the security; they would actually take the drugs, go around the security, and then do a series of things -- either given to someone outside the airport, or themselves transport them to other cities using their American Airlines flight privileges to do that.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Now, these rings, I assume -- first of all, do you know how long they had been operating before you all got wise to them and how much contraband they've actually succeeded in bringing into this country?

RAYMOND KELLY: Difficult to say. This investigation lasted two and a half years. Obviously, it's been going on before then.

MARGARET WARNER: And was it also going on during your investigation? In other words, they had real clients at the same time that you all were an undercover client?

RAYMOND KELLY: That's right. They brought in and we confiscated in this case almost 700 pounds of cocaine. Now, we also used sham cocaine. It was about 250 pounds. And there was 50 pounds of heroin confiscated in this case as well. So, right, there was an ongoing smuggling operation while this investigation was being conducted.

MARGARET WARNER: Who are their clients? In other words, who are the sellers who were using them, and who are the buyers?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, they're relatively low level people -- again, being distributed in major cities in the United States. We used -- that is Customs and DEA used the sham cocaine approach to get intelligence information to see how the process was working. And it indicated, as you said, and as Mr. Scott said, a rather free-form, open approach to all of this. They were able to fly virtually anywhere in the country. So it was focused not only on East Coast cities, Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, and then go back and do it again.

MARGARET WARNER: How widespread do you think this form of smuggling is? For instance, do you have any idea what percentage of the illegal drugs that come into this country come this way using somehow the special access that airline employees have?

RAYMOND KELLY: Very difficult to say. Obviously, this is cause for concern for us. There is a carrier initiative program -- they call it a super carrier initiative program -- the 15 largest carriers in the United States, international carriers, are involved in this program. We asked them to do a series of things -- preemptive examinations of airplanes outside of the country before they come in. And by and large, that program is operating well. But it's so difficult for us to get a handle, to get a sense of how large spread this problem is. American Airlines is the dominant carrier in Miami. That's where this investigation started. So we're not certain this skews the size of the problem or not. But we're clearly looking into other carriers and other locations, other airports in the United States.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Now, let's look now at the security procedures or the lack thereof that you all identified at American Airlines. Are their procedures typical of airlines, the fact that, for instance, employees can come in and out at will even if they had no reason to be there, the fact that they can use their passes, they even used some of those carts to go up to the airplanes -- I mean, is that typical?

RAYMOND KELLY: Generally speaking, it is. And what we need is much closer scrutiny and much closer monitoring on the part of the airlines of their employees. We need, for instance, a card access system so you know where an employee goes when they enter, when they leave -- magnetometers, basic things that employees are not subject to. They're able to come in -- again -- off duty, have access to the ramps, access to the tarmac without supervision. They're not working, so nobody is really looking at them. We need to have these airlines focus and focus hard on some of these issues. This just underscored the major vulnerability that exists in this area.

MARGARET WARNER: But it seems kind of obvious. I mean, your agency and others have elaborate procedures to catch passengers, so it would seem naturally that people who might smuggle drugs would try the other route. Why haven't the airlines done more? Why don't they, for instance, take some of the simple steps you just outlines?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, I think it's been sporadic and perhaps we have to, government, that is, focus their attention on these issues and hopefully a case like this will do that. We have the likely authority to fine airlines when drugs are found on the aircraft. And basically that has been downplayed in the last few years because we want airlines to increase their security presence, their security procedures. Generally speaking, that's happened, but I think we really have to collectively refocus on this problem.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, you suggested in the little clip we ran of your press conference there were some legal restrictions or something on the airlines in terms of the kinds of background checks they could conduct on employees. What did you mean by that?

RAYMOND KELLY: Some of it is limited by labor agreements that they have. And the background investigations that are being done now are pretty cursory. They really aren't in-depth. There's also a fairly rapid turnover in some of these jobs. Now, it is a burden on the airline, but it's something that we, government, have to work more closely with the airline to ensure that more in-depth background investigations are being conducted. We want them to know who they're hiring.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, what about the threat or the danger to airline passengers? I mean, that story -- and I know it's been publicized before -- but, I mean, about the pilot getting the coffee with the cocaine was pretty chilling. I mean, what do you see as the danger here -- say in the kind of drug smuggling that apparently went on -- to passengers?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, the airlines, I think, have been particularly attentive to the issue of drugs being placed in areas that may put the aircraft in danger. A few years ago, there were cases like that. Under the carrier initiative program, we demand that a full search be done of the aircraft. We feel confident that the areas concerning the safety of the aircraft are being examined by the airlines.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you mean, the areas...

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, for instance, in engine components -

MARGARET WARNER: Oh, I see.

RAYMOND KELLY: -- or things that may affect the avionics of the aircraft. I think that's a lesson that's been well-learned by the airlines. But drugs can show up in a lot of other areas as well in an aircraft. We actually had them hanging off of a string under the floorboards of the aircraft. So there's myriad of ways. Of course the coffee filter is another classic case. So it's a complex piece of machinery. You can hide things all over an aircraft. But I think the safety issues are addressed by the airlines very early on in their examination of an aircraft.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you think much weapons smuggling goes on? I know the U.S. Attorney said that you all, just in the past month, those hand grenades and stuff were caught in July and August-- or rather, were set up in July and August. Do you think a lot of weapons smuggling is going on like this?

RAYMOND KELLY: No, I don't. Weapons are not coming into the U.S. for the most part. I mean weapons have been going out of the U.S.; that's more of a concern. But I think the U.S. Attorney wanted to demonstrate how kind of ruthless these people were, that they didn't care what they brought on the aircraft. They knew clearly, the three hand grenades, two clips of ammunition and a Glock 9 millimeter handgun, they knew it openly and they were transporting sham cocaine at the same time, so it was a dual-purpose mission.

MARGARET WARNER: With these arrests today, do you think you've nipped the problem in the bud in terms of involving American Airlines at least at Miami?

RAYMOND KELLY: Yes, I think this has been obviously a major accomplishment on the part of the investigative agencies. But the investigation is continuing. We're doing investigations in other locations, and we're going to continue to look at this area very closely.

MARGARET WARNER: But I mean do you think you've got -- did the investigation come to an end now? Are the arrests being announced now because you felt you've come to the end of that particular operation, you knew everyone who was involved?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, there's -- generally, yes, but there's more to come.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you very much.

RAYMOND KELLY: Okay, thank you.

UPDATE - FAULT LINES

MARGARET WARNER: Now, an update on the earthquake in Turkey and possible lessons for the United States. We start with a report by John Irvine of Independent Television News.

JOHN IRVINE: Communities living under canvas: This is a familiar sight across the earthquake zone. The 200,000 survivors have become refugees. Today we flew over the town of Yaleva. Here like elsewhere, for every demolished building, there are dozens more partially collapsed. They will have to be pulled down. It will be a long time indeed before people take holidays again in this seaside resort. Poor weather has made living conditions even more arduous, but mercifully there's no sign of the epidemics that were feared. 50,000 Turkish soldiers are now helping in the relief effort, but some victims of the quake are still critical of their own government. They reserve praise, however, for other countries. "Aid has come from America, Israel and elsewhere. Even the Greeks have helped us," said this man. "It would be great if these new friendships could continue." The official death toll stands at 12,500, but three times that number of people are still missing. They are lost under rubble and under water. In some areas, the shoreline was reclaimed land, but now the sea has taken much of it back. Although the earthquake happened at 3 o'clock in the morning, it was a hot night, and the promenade here at Golcuk was still a busy place. That promenade is now gone. At least 150 people lost their lives here. As divers spent the day searching for bodies, expert survivors deduced that this land was simply too vulnerable to build on.

MARCO MUCCIARELLI, Seismologist: Unfortunately, here people built it too close to the coastline for high seismicity region.

JOHN IRVINE: No longer do they work carefully through the rubble. This has become a clearance operation, and tragically that means many of the dead will stay lost in the wreckage.

MARGARET WARNER: Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco takes the story from there.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What lessons should officials and builders in California and other earthquake-prone areas of the U.S. draw from the Turkish quake? The day after the Turkish disaster there was a small quake north of San Francisco, a reminder that millions of people live and work near the San Andreas Fault that runs down much of California. We turn now to Maryann Phipps, a principal at Degenkolb Engineers, a structural engineering firm headquartered in San Francisco; Peter Yanev, president of E.Q.E. International, a risk management and structural engineering firm also based in San Francisco-- he is just back from Turkey; and Robert Wesson, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Peter Yanev, describe the damage that you saw.

PETER YANEV, Structural Engineer: Well, let me go back a little bit because this is not the first time. I've sent teams to about 70 earthquakes now. I've personally gone to about 34, 35, including some of the century's worth events. And this is, in my opinion, the worst so far.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And continue. What did you see?

PETER YANEV: Well, it was destruction on a massive scale. Many, many hundreds, probably thousands-- I couldn't see them all-- buildings collapsed, many probably tens of thousands of buildings, damaged, most of them concrete, some of them of the type that we have in California, older buildings. The footage of some of the ground settlement, much of that was caused by faulting right in the vicinity of the buildings you just showed. There is quite a bit of faulting in the area that actually collapsed hundreds of buildings. This was a new experience for me. It was very much like the 1906 earthquake...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Can you explain that a little bit, faulting in the areas?

PETER YANEV: In 1906, the San Andreas Fault broke over a long distance a couple of hundred miles plus, where the western part of California slipped North with respect to the continental United States. In effect, the North Anatolian Fault that caused this earthquake did the same thing. Most of Turkey slipped ten, twelve feet towards Greece to the West. And where the actual faulting occurred, where the ground ruptured, were many hundreds of buildings right on top of the fault, and most of those collapsed almost instantly.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Whether Yanev, I'm going to come back to you for some more specifics about the buildings. But first, Mr. Wesson, you've been studying the motion recordings posted on the web from Turkey. What are you seeing? What have you learned? And what are they?

ROBERT WESSON, U.S. Geological Survey: Elizabeth, in California, in the western United States and in Turkey, strong motion accelographs are installed to measure the kind of strong shaking that we saw from this earthquake. So far, there are not quite ten strong motion recordings that have come to us from Turkey, and we see what we call accelerations-- that's one of the parameters that are measured with these instruments-- we see accelerations about one-third of a G, one-third of the acceleration due to gravity. These are accelerations that we would expect from an earthquake about this magnitude, and it's the kind of accelerations that buildings are designed for in California.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Mr. Yanev, what did you learn about the structural damage specifically from your trip?

PETER YANEV: We were able to take a look at a wide variety of structures, from industrial to residential to commercial buildings. The primary reason for the massive failures is inadequate structural design of the buildings. Typically in Turkey they build using concrete. They make these relatively simple concrete frame buildings, and then in-fill between the frames where the windows and the doors are with unreinforced masonry. It is popular construction in much of the world. It's used in other areas of the U.S. where we have no earthquakes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay now, I'm going to interrupt you right here because we've got some visual aids here in San Francisco to understand this and then I'll come back to you. Maryann Phipps, explain this more, the rebar you've got for us.

MARYANN PHIPPS, Structural Engineer: Well, what we need to have buildings remain safe in an earthquake is we need strength and we need toughness. And when we talk about reinforced concrete construction, the toughness comes from the reinforcing steel, or rebar as it's called. So this is a piece of rebar like we would see in any construction site in the United States, similar to what was in the Turkish buildings, but in many ways very, very different. In the buildings in Turkey, the reinforcing steel was mostly smooth bars, not deformed like these are, so they didn't catch on and connect to the concrete as well. And it wasn't wrapped with other reinforcing steel to make it tough and to give it some...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. We have a picture actually here. Explain what we're seeing in this picture.

MARYANN PHIPPS: What we're seeing in the picture is long reinforcement without much confining reinforcement around it, and so what happens is the concrete inside of it basically, once it cracks, is no longer able to withstand any load, so it just becomes rubble and leads to the collapse. In contrast, what we need is this closely-spaced reinforcement, these hoops or ties.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We've got a picture of that, too. And this is what you'd see in the United States.

MARYANN PHIPPS: That's what we'd see in virtually any earthquake-prone areas in the United States in a concrete frame type construction. And it's those bars, those extra bars that give the building some level of toughness, the ability to kind of hang tough and hang together and withstand or ride out a long earthquake.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, Mr. Yanev, did the buildings you saw that were built according to code-- I understand the codes are similar right, in Turkey and here?

PETER YANEV: Yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did they survive?

PETER YANEV: Well, it is difficult to judge by quickly looking at the building without the plans, but what was obvious that you would have a collapse right next to it a building that was intact, near it a building that had no damage then several collapsed buildings. So obviously, there were great differences in the quality of the construction, the quality of the design. Now, what Maryann said is exactly right. In Turkey, the situation is a bit different. In the United States, in California certainly, we have very strict inspection of the engineering design for different buildings. That is not the case in Turkey. So the engineer may have actually designed the building to have all these reinforcing details that we showed, but if they're not built in the field because nobody is inspecting and the contractor does what he wants, you run into problems. In Yaleva, which you talked about earlier, one contractor apparently designed somewhere around 60 buildings, all but two of them collapsed in the earthquake. These are all buildings done in the last five years. So it's not just the design; it's the quality of the construction. In fact, the Turkish code is identical for practical purposes to the California code. The application, however, is very different for the common buildings. We saw very high quality in some of the industrial buildings, comparable to what we have here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Let's get into the lessons now, beginning with you, Mr. Wesson. What lessons, judging from everything you've learned, do you draw for those of us in San Francisco, for example, or other earthquake-prone areas?

ROBERT WESSON: The principal lesson, Elizabeth, is that we have to remain vigilant. There was an earthquake along this same section of the fault just over 100 years ago. So 100 years seems like a long time to those of us who are trying to pay our mortgage or worry about groceries for the next day, but when we're worried about earthquake issues, we have to really take a very long view. Secondly, there are many lessons ... this is such a tragic earthquake, but there are many cities around the world, not in California, but in the developing world, where we have the same problems that we have in Turkey, and this truly unfortunate disaster could happen in many other places. Thirdly, as I think my engineering colleagues will discuss, there are buildings in California, in the seismically-active parts of the United States, that are not built to the current codes and could represent serious problems in the event of an earthquake.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Maryann Phipps, talks about those buildings. And would there be a loss of life similar to Turkey if an earthquake like that occurred here?

MARYANN PHIPPS: Well, if we have a similar earthquake, we are definitely going to see a lot of damage in our buildings. We will not, however, see the some kind of loss of life, and that's because many of the buildings that we've constructed over the past 30 years are likely to protect the life safety of the building occupants and those nearby in an earthquake. Our codes, our enforcement of the codes and the quality of construction will give us a much higher level of protection in that new construction. But it's correct that we have lots of older buildings, too. We have a large building inventory, many of them built over the past century, and several of those buildings will in fact be collapse hazards, partial collapse hazards in an earthquake of the type we saw in Turkey.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you recommend be done with those buildings?

MARYANN PHIPPS: Well, we need to be vigilant about moving forward and preparing ourselves by retrofitting them, by phasing them out over time. You know, in California for example, with our hospitals, we have a program that by 2008, we will have strengthened or taken out of commission any hospitals that pose a safety hazard in an earthquake. We need to take that same kind of precaution, those some kind of steps for other classes, other types of buildings that we know are vulnerable in earthquakes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Yanev, what lessons do you draw?

PETER YANEV: Well, there are many. I'll try and hit two or three of the best ones. We've done one thing very well in California. Dr. Wesson's colleagues, the geologists, have done a wonderful job of delineating many of the active faults in California. We have laws where we cannot build on top of the faults. One of the major problems from this earthquake as I said, were collapses of hundreds of six-, seven-, eight-story buildings that were on top of the fault that ruptured. We also have much stricter code enforcement here in California. I think that leaves something to be desired in other parts of the country. For example, the areas around St. Louis, around Salt Lake City, around Seattle I think need to have a bit stronger construction than they are currently using. That will take a long time to explain, but effectively their construction, because of lower probability of earthquakes is weaker than what we use in California where we have more frequent earthquakes. However, when large earthquakes occurred, whether it's Salt Lake or it is Seattle or it is San Francisco, the damage can be spectacular. The higher the design, the lower the damage. We also saw some very, very good performance of well-designed modern structures in Turkey. That is encouraging.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Mr. Yanev, you saw the refinery that burned.

PETER YANEV: Yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What did you learn about oil refineries near faults -- which are there are many of them here in the bay area and in LA.

PETER YANEV: That's right. Thank you for reminding me about that. That refinery probably has suffered a loss of $1 billion. Right now, the estimate for the whole earthquake covers around $25 billion. That may be a very preliminary number. It may be much higher. It may be somewhat lower. So one industrial site accounts for 4 percent of the total loss of property, not lives. There were no lives lost, as far as I know, in the immediate vicinity there. The refinery is not that different from many refineries around the world. More so if you look around Tokyo Bay, where there is a very high density of refineries, many of them built to much lower standards than what we saw in Turkey -- we are looking there at a human and environmental disaster waiting to happen. There are many companies around the world that need to take the lesson of Turkey at heart. Industrial buildings in general have another problem and that is business interruption. Without these buildings, factories cannot work. For example, Silicon Valley in the Bay area, in a major earthquake, many of the fabs on which we depend to manufacture the silicon chips would not be functional for months afterwards?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry. What my of the "what" would not be functional?

PETER YANEV: Of what we call the fabs, the fabricating plants that manufacture the chips -

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Oh, right.

PETER YANEV: -- silicon chips that go in all this sophisticated modern equipment, electronic equipment. We expect that a similar earthquake such as the one in Turkey, in Japan, in California, in Taiwan, in other areas with high-tech industry, would cause business interruption - in other words, shutting down of major industrial facilities for as much as eight months. This is probably what will happen with the refinery. And this produces about a third of the oil of Turkey. They've got another problem on top of the obvious problem of life loss and building loss.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Wesson in the short amount of time we have, they're putting senses sensors in that fault like they are faults here. Any chance that they'll be able to foresee another quake?

ROBERT WESSON: Elizabeth, we're not very... we can't predict earthquakes in the short term. We can make some probabilistic statements about the long-term probabilities, statements like those were made for this part of the North Anatolian Fault, but we're not able to make short-term predictions. What we can learn from sensors is about the character of the faulting and about the character of the ground motion that affects these buildings.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right, well, thank you all very much for being with us.

FOCUS - UNWANTED

MARGARET WARNER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, fighting gangs in Illinois, and a David Gergen dialogue. Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW, Chicago, has the gang story.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: During the day, Cicero, Illinois, a blue collar suburb of almost 70,000 residents just west of Chicago, looks peaceful enough with its rows of neat bungalows. But as the daylight dims, it's a different story; with sirens blazing, Cicero police race to another gang-related shooting. An 18-year-old hit in a drive-by shooting while riding a bicycle down a main Cicero street had stumbled into a nearby restaurant and collapsed. Adam Rodriguez, the 23rd gang-related shooting victim of the year, was critically injured but survived.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE, Town President: They shot him all through here.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Cicero town president Betty Loren-Maltese was one of the first on the scene. She questioned police detective Jerry Schlatta.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: So this has to be the Sin City Boys and the Latin Angels. Jerry, how many times do you think you arrested this kid?

JERRY CHLADA, Police Detective: Numerous times in the last few years, hanging around with gangs and nonsense.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: Are you surprised by this?

JERRY CHLADA: No, not at all. You play around with guns, you're going to get killed.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: See, this will lead probably it another death, another shooting for retaliation. I mean this has got to stop.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: To try and stop the violence, Cicero passed the country's first gang-eviction law. The highly controversial ordinance bans active gang members from town. If they don't leave and remain active gang members, they're subject to a $500-a-day fine. Though its constitutionality has been questioned, the ordinance has the support of many Cicero residents, like Mary Ann Burnett, who felt the night's violence had struck too close to home.

MARY ANN BURNETT, Resident: That could have been my daughter that was bad... could have been badly hurt because they were just there ten minutes prior to the shooting. And I had just went in the house to eat my dinner and I saw and heard... well, I heard gun shots from my kitchen, and I stood up and I saw a silverish gray caravan-like vehicle speed away. And then I heard that Adam was shot.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: You think this gang-free ordinance is important to Cicero?

MARY ANN BURNETT: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It was nice once. It can be nice again if people just care and just keep running them off.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Some cities like San Jose and Los Angeles, have passed anti-gangordinances, asking for injunctions against gang members' behavior. But no other municipality has tried to banish gang members from their town.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: I think, because the gangs have become more dangerous, more families are affected by it, and I think people all over are just fed up. And the sad thing is it's not only in Cicero; it's across the whole United States.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Cicero has experience with gangsters. In the 1920's, Al Capone based his bootlegging operation in Cicero after getting kicked out of Chicago. But this April, town residents passed a referendum calling for Cicero to become a gang-free zone. Town trustees followed up with a controversial ordinance. Town Attorney Barry Pechter.

BARRY PECHTER, Town Attorney: The town president came to me and stated that she had the belief that people that were involved in criminal activity, gang members that were being involved in criminal activity, did not have the right to live within the town of Cicero, or should not have the right. At first everyone said, "that's just ridiculous." And slowly but surely, even the attorneys, the tide has seemed to change. What looked to be impossible to them in the beginning, now all of a sudden everybody seems to be stepping back a little and saying, "not only is it good public debate. It could work."

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: It would work by having the superintendent of police first identify and then subpoena a suspected gang member. In a civil hearing, the city would then have to prove that the person

was in a gang and currently involved in gang-related criminal activity. If the city proved its case, the person would then have a choice: Leave town, pay a $500-a-day fine or quit the gang. Gang members are already feeling the heat. These Sin City gang members say several gang members they know have already left town. So what would these three do?

GANG MEMBER: I'll drop, then.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: You'd get out of the gang? And you would pay $500?

GANG MEMBER: If I had the money, but not every day.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: And you would leave town?

GANG MEMBER: Yeah, but I'd still come back around.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: But in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb a little north of Cicero, Political Science Professor Evan McKenzie says their town's gang prevention and intervention programs have worked well and are much more effective than banishment.

EVAN McKENZIE, University of Illinois-Chicago: When young people decide to enter a gang lifestyle, is this type of a program the best way to keep them from doing that? And I just think it's completely wrong- headed to take a segment of your society, your own community, the people who live in your town who went to your schools, who walk in your streets and play in your parks, your kids, and then argue that they are the enemy and that they have to be banished from the community.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Cicero does have some successful gang-intervention programs. Seniors Victor Borrego and Oscar Suarez both credit the program at their high school in Cicero with keeping them in school and out of gang activity.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: What do you think of the gang ordinance?

OSCAR SUAREZ, Student: It's treating us like prisoners because we can't even stand in front of our own house because we're getting harassed by the cops. They stop and say, "what are you doing, how come you're hanging' out here? Don't you have something to do?" And then they search unfortunate for no reason. And even though you ain't a gang member, they're still going to stop and harass you. They don't care. They want to see you out of Cicero.

VICTOR BORREGO, Student: I don't think it's right. I think... I don't know. A lot of people take it like discrimination towards us, Hispanic people.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: In the past 15 years, Cicero has gone from a white ethnic enclave known for its intolerance -- Martin Luther King, Jr. called Cicero the Selma of the North - to one that is nearly 60 percent Latino. Police estimate that 75 percent of gang members are Latino. Some Latinos worry that the real motivation behind the ordinance is to get not only the gangs out of Cicero, but Latinos as well. Maria Valdes, the senior litigator for the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund.

MARIA VALDES, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund: First the ordinance itself is pretty vague in terms of what is a gang member. And because of the vagueness of the language of the ordinance, it gives broad powers to the police and other people to accuse Latino residents of being a gang member and hauling them into the court that Cicero will be setting up. Secondly, we think that it may actually, you know, lead to a targeting of Latino residents in Cicero.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: But Loren-Maltese flatly denies that the ordinance targets Latinos.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: Here we had 88 shootings where 17 resulted in death. And 13 out of the 17 were Hispanic people. So when Hispanics say, you know, that it's targeted at the Hispanic community, if anything, it's going to protect the Hispanic community more because we have Hispanics killing Hispanics.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: In fact, many of the new Latinos in town say the ordinance does make them feel safer.

MARIA LOZA, Resident: I worry because I have a lot of kids and I want to go out in the street in the day or in the evening, and sometimes I listen shooting the guys...

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: You hear shooting?

MARIA LOZA: Yeah, shooting. So better for us because when the gun is out here, it's more better for the...

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: If the guns are gone?

MARIA LOZA: Yeah. Yeah, I like it.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Despite the neighborhood support, American Civil Liberties Union Attorney Harvey Grossman, says the ordinance is clearly unconstitutional.

HARVEY GROSSMAN, American Civil Liberties Union: We simply do not allow, under our constitutional form of government, for a household and banishment to be put at issue.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: What right is that?

HARVEY GROSSMAN: That's a substantive right of due process, one's right to have a household, to maintain a family unit. Under this ordinance, children would be evicted from their households.

BARRY PECHTER: And my argument to that is, after due process is afforded to the individual, that as in criminal laws, that sometimes people must be removed from the town, people must go to jail. We have the ultimate banishment in effect in this country of the death penalty. To live in a civilized society, sometimes you have to enforce the rights of the law-abiding citizen, rather than the rights of the accused.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Loren-Maltese also disagrees with the A.C.L.U., arguing that the ordinance will strengthen, not harm, the family. She says it will give parents a wake-up call, a call she tries to deliver every chance she gets as when this traffic stop turned up a suspected gang member and his parents hurried to the scene.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: Well, that should be a wake-up call for you. A lot of parents don't know the signals. That should be a wake-up call.

OFFICER: If other gang members come and see him with that evening upside-down and those signals on his belt, they're going to think he is a gang member and they're going to start shooting.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Loren-Maltese, says the ordinance will not run kids like this out of town, but the town has started impounding the cars of suspected gang members.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: I think this ordinance and the lawsuit is going to make parents responsible. It's a wake-up call for them, too.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: If a parent winds up not being able to deal with a kid, which certainly happens sometimes, then that kid is going to have to leave town.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: Well, it's probably better for the family because probably a sibling would be killed in a drive-by.

BETTY LOREN-MALTESE: The seven things went through him.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The town president is so adamant about the new ordinance, she says gates will be constructed at the town's border to prevent those who have been expelled from Cicero from ever returning home.

DIALOGUE

MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen engages Theodore and Nancy Sizer, longtime educators who last year served as co-principals of a charter school in Massachusetts. They are the authors of "The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract."

DAVID GERGEN: Welcome. Let me ask you, Ted, for starters, what do you mean by this title "The Students are Watching?"

THEODORE SIZER, Author, "The Students Are Watching:" The youngsters in schools watch us all the time. They judge us all the time. If we are obviously interested in our subjects, they see that we practice what we preach. If they see us as merely cranking out meaningless work for them to do, they say, "this is... it couldn't be important because our teacher doesn't deal with it." If the schools are shabby and the libraries are under-stocked, if the laboratories are threadbare, they say, "well, they couldn't care about us because if they cared about us in this rich country, they would equip the school properly." So if we care about the values that kids develop as adolescents we have to care very much about how we, as adults, treat each other, treat our institutions, treat our subjects. The kids watch us and they learn from what they see.

DAVID GERGEN: I'm curious, on this question of values, you write in your book that we have a profound moral contract with our students.

NANCY SIZER, "The Students Are Watching:" Well, for me, it's profound. I think for very many adults it's pretty profound, that we would like to offer our children good schools. We tried to not make it an angry book because we love the people in schools, and we love the stories we can tell about schools. But we also would like to make people understand that we need to do a little better and that there are some ways we could be doing better.

DAVID GERGEN: The emphasis on your book seemed to be not just that we should not be teaching just students just to prepare for the world of work or to deepen their minds, strengthen their minds, but to teach them to be thoughtful citizens and decent human beings.

NANCY SIZER: That's the point of the book really.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. And that's a critical part of the moral contract, to help them grow up to be those kind of citizens?

THEODORE SIZER: It goes back to the basic reasons for public education in this country, way back into the 18th, as well as the 19th century. It's to learn up decent people to live in a republic, people who care about the community as a community, people who watch out for each other, people who share when sharing is appropriate, people who are in the habit of thinking hard about the important things. These are noble ideas. They go back long in our history. They're worth really articulating again strenuously, and we hope the book helps that articulation.

DAVID GERGEN: There's a great deal of emphasis now upon scores in classrooms, how well students do on math, how well they do on their verbal and that sort of thing. Is that emphasis getting in the way of helping students improve their character?

NANCY SIZER: Yes, because the best way a student starts to develop his own personal moral ideas and his final code really that... or at least little guiding sets of principles which help him to make decisions, is to wrestle out questions and he should do that a lot. He should do that with texts, which might be part of the school anyway, and where he could be learning two things, one is to read well and the other is to wrestle out questions. But he needs the time of his teacher, he needs the time of his fellow classmates, he really needs to put time into that problem, or else he won't have anything to fall back on when he needs to make decisions.

THEODORE SIZER: Don't get us wrong. It's not that we're against assessment and testing with a small "t." It's many that many of the existing tests trivialize the really rigorous work the kids should do, the kind of work that for adolescents, can only be truly plumbed in a dialogue, is that to have the youngster show his work to you, challenge him on it, question him, make sure, from a series of questions, that he really understands it. That's far more rigorous, at least to a far more rigorous standard than figuring out how to deal with something in a paper-and-pencil test over a short period of time. Paper and pencil tests are fine, they have their place, they tell us something, but they don't tell us most of the matter. And what we in education ought to do is believe that the standards should and must be high, but make sure that our assessment systems are as deep and as rigorous as they have to be to really push something important.

DAVID GERGEN: It sounds as if you almost would like to go back to a Socratic dialogue, of Socrates and academy and open growth in a small place, engaging students...

THEODORE SIZER: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: ...and improving their minds and character.

THEODORE SIZER: You have this wonderful American education wonderfully in the second grade and in the Ph.D. program. It's the stuff in the middle that gets in the way. It's the kind of challenge that is very personal, somebody who is an expert says, "explain that to me, please."

DAVID GERGEN: What is the ideal school, then? There's an emphasis in many places, California is one, where they're trying to reduce the size of the classroom. But you seem to be arguing it's not just the size of the classroom; it's the size of the school. You have to get the schools down in size.

NANCY SIZER: You should do both. The classroom should be small enough so a kid can honestly learn to deal properly with airtime, which he would be able to have. At the present time, with 32 kids in a class, a student walks in there knowing that, if he speaks once or twice, that will be a good day for him. Ted and I have shadowed kids in schools and we've been with kids all day who never spoke once in class, never spoke once in class. That's dis-human. That's not human, you know, not to speak in the environment you're in. So we need to keep the class size down. We also need to keep the load of the teacher down so that the teacher can really get to know the student, not just his name and that he usually wears such and such a color sweater but something really deeper like how when he makes mistakes, does he deal with this kind of criticism or that kind of criticism or what helps him to resolve to improve, what kinds of things motivate him, things like that, which takes time.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. Are there models?

THEODORE SIZER: Oh, yes.

NANCY SIZER: Oh, lots of them.

THEODORE SIZER: There are lots of them, and that that is what gives us so much hope. Many of them are the products of the work over the last 20 years. They tend to be small schools, very simple schools, very focused schools, schools which are respectful of kids' minds. Often when you think of a pimply 15-year-old, you don't think about, you know, the strength of their minds. But good schools do that and push and push and push, but push in ways that are respectful of who that child is. And they're out there. There are too few high schools of that kind because for 100 years we've designed high schools like large factories and have processed kids, and it doesn't work. It hasn't worked. There is 40 years of detailed research showing that it hasn't worked. But it's such a interlocking, complex machine, the big high school, the big comprehensive high school, that it's very hard to change because you have to change it all at once. And where we see the flickers and real demonstrations of hope are new schools or big schools that have broken into little schools and they're popping up, particularly in big cities around this country. They started popping 15 years ago.

DAVID GERGEN: Are they charter schools by and large?

THEODORE SIZER: By and large not. They're schools that have been given running room by school boards and by union leadership.

DAVID GERGEN: Those are the ones who are fulfilling a moral contract?

NANCY SIZER: Well, that's very exciting and glamorous because in fact those students are able to make quite a leap over what they had before. So that the change in their prospects in life is really wonderfully dramatic. If you went out to a school that was more suburban, the change would be subtler because those kids are getting a lot of good things out of life already. And so they can sometimes manage not to have such a good personal school and still be bet other. For instance, we were talking earlier about a kid's mind works well. Well, maybe that's from conversations at home. Maybe that's Boy Scouts, maybe that's the church, maybe that's the school. Maybe that's all of those things. But I don't think we need dramatic change. We just need improvement.

DAVID GERGEN: Well, Nancy and Ted Sizer, thank you both very much.

THEODORE SIZER: Thank you.

RECAP

MARGARET WARNER: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday. Dozens of American Airlines employees and contract workers were arrested and charged with smuggling drugs and weapons on the airline's planes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at another record high, at 11,326. And Turkish officials revised the earthquake death toll downward to 12,594, 5,000 fewer than yesterday. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Thank you and good night.