Two days ago, the Inquirer offered a bit of a sneak peek: Our emergency management system was found ... wait for it ... lacking. At least in comparison to other cities.

Excellent.

This preview came courtesy James Eisenhower, a board me mber of PICA, the state agency created to babysit the city's finances back in the lazy, hazy, crazy days of the Goode administration. Eisenhower, it seems, wanted to brace his fellow board members for the possibility that Philly would be asking for more funds to strengthen its ability to deal with emergencies, natural or otherwise.

That we're underprepared is no surprise. I spend a lot of my idle time thinking about ways to terrorize the city, and boy, talk about your low-hanging fruit.

It's not like I can help it. I moonlight as a crime and thriller novelist, and whenever my imagination roams free (usually on the Frankford El) I'm thinking about holes in our city's security. You can't write a thriller without a big evil plot afoot.

(Not surprisingly, many of my terror scenarios involve the Frankford El. But I digress.)

((Okay, to digress further, just for a moment: I've terrorized the El many times over in my imagination ... Let me put it this way. The North Koreans don't need a Taepodong-2. They just need a SEPTA token.))

I could detail many ways to destroy Philadelphia here, but of course I won't. I love this city. And I wouldn't want Dubya calling "treason" on me.

Though I will give you one clue: See that photo on the opposite page? Mike Regan's "Angle"? He snapped that pic from somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. The area was unguarded, and a pretty big target in this city. "I could have easily had a bomb in my car," Mike told me.

If I can come up with a dozen ways to terrorize this town ... if our staff photographer could stumble across one by accident ... you'd think real terrorists would make short work of this place, too.

So I'm hoping that this expensive task force (one consultant alone cost us $1 million) has a bunch of great ideas about how to protect our city in the event of a crisis.

But here's an odd thing:

I never spend time daydreaming about smaller, street-crime-style scenarios. That's one area where my overactive imagination doesn't need any help.

Who needs an imagination where you have schoolkids finding the dead body of a woman next to a dumpster? Where you have Inquirer headlines like "3 die in separate city shootings last night" and then you read the piece and you realize, Oh shit, that's about 10 blocks from where my kids sleep? Where a hero cop is gunned down trying to save a barmaid who has a gun to her head ... in a cop bar.

If I tried to put some of this stuff in a novel, my editor would flag it as unbelievable.

There is more than one kind of terror. There's the CNN terror you see around the world, and there's the local terror that we've somehow, inexplicably, just come to accept.

Today, or soon, the mayor will probably ask for money to help the office of emergency management. Which is great.

But why can't we dedicate funds to local terrorism ... thugs with guns who murder innocent kids? The mayor should be pumping some of our "surprise" budget surplus money into the police department. We need a task force, but we also need more cops on the streets.

So I may daydream about terrorist scenarios on the El. But there are even more nightmarish scenarios out there.

All I have to do is step off the El.