OK, first of all, wouldn’t it enter anyone’s mind that something may be wrong with the models if you come up with Boise, Idaho? And doesn’t this report provide the terrorists with all the information necessary for them to devastate a city that they may not have been thinking of targeting (I think highlighting the stupidity of their enemy would be tempting).

A new study funded largely by the Department of Homeland Security ranked 132 American cities according to vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Boise was the only city in the western half of the country to make the top 10.

“To be honest, we’re a little bit surprised,” said Adam Park, a spokesman for Boise, a landlocked city of 200,000 where the big event this weekend is a Professional Bull Riders invitational.
[…]
“Is this a typo or what?” asked Bobbie Patterson, executive director of the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Where in the world did this information come from?”
It came from four years of work and a series of mathematical formulas developed by Walter W. Piegorsch, a professor at the University of Arizona, with help from Susan Cutter at the University of South Carolina and Frank Hardisty at Pennsylvania State University. The study was published in December by Risk Analysis, a well-regarded journal.
The researchers assessed the vulnerability of each city to a terrorist attack based on three things: socioeconomics, infrastructure, and geophysical hazards such as the potential for flooding or fire.
The analysis measured not whether a city would make an attractive target to a terrorist but rather how well it could withstand an attack, Piegorsch said.
“This wasn’t a question of what places a terrorist wants,” Piegorsch said. “The targetability is not an issue here; it’s the vulnerability if they were targeted.”

What in the heck is the purpose of this study? We want to see if cities that aren’t great targets for al-Qaeda would withstand an attack? Why?
This report is a joke! And another example of our tax dollars at work.