He said the biggest change the Olympics brought was convincing all agencies at all levels to share information. "It is a big change. A few years back, there really wasn't a lot of sharing," he said. "Now there are partnerships with every level of government and the private sector. And those don't happen overnight."

Also, Brian Garrett, director of the State Office of Emergency Services, has said that while Utah for decades planned for such natural disasters as earthquakes and floods, 9/11 forced it to add terrorism to such planning.

Officials do not make public many specifics of their anti-terrorism plans so that they do not weaken their hand against terrorists. But they offer some general information.

Water systems

An example is that local water systems were required by federal law to look at how vulnerable they might be to attack and to develop plans to overcome that.

Hooton said Salt Lake City began that early because of the Olympics.

"We have a lot of instrumentation now that we didn't before, particularly in drinking water to monitor quality and contamination," Hooton said. In short, it is now set up to look constantly for chemical or biological attack through the water system — something it could not do well before 9/11.

"Some of that stuff we pioneered during the Olympics. I can't be too specific about it, though," Hooton says.

Also, as shown by the geocacher who was surrounded by police at the sewage plant, the city and other water districts have also strengthened security. "Within a lot of our facilities, we have a lot of cameras that would give us some kind of alert" about intruders, Hooton says.

It has more guards. It has added more fences and other physical barriers. "For example, our City Creek facility is all fenced in now, and barriers make it more difficult to get into those facilities. Also, law enforcement is patrolling there more," he says.

The city and other districts have also developed written plans to follow in case an attack does occur on key facilities. That way, they do not need to "wing it" in an emergency. Hooton said exercises occasionally practice those emergency steps.

Air attack

The government may also be monitoring air quality here for signs of biological, chemical or radiological attack — but then again, it may not.

It definitely did that during the Olympics. According to the Congressional Research Service, the National Security Administration made early use here of its Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System, developed by the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National laboratories.

BASIS was "deployed for both indoor and outdoor monitoring at the Salt Lake City Olympics," CRS reports. It was a series of stations that collected air through filters and then had the filters checked for signs of biological warfare agents.