Pennsylvania pursues backup role as ‘Wall Street West’

Pennsylvania is trying to convince the nation’s top financial services and insurance companies to establish backup operations in the state so that markets can recover quickly in the event of another terror strike on New York.

Gov. Ed Rendell has pledged more than $30 million to “Wall Street West,” an initiative to build millions of square feet of office space, improve infrastructure and install hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable in nine counties.

Executives from more than 20 Wall Street firms were scheduled for a 30-minute helicopter ride from Manhattan to the Pocono Mountains earlier this month to listen to the state’s sales pitch, and there are indications that at least one company is about to pull the trigger.

“I think we’re so close today that maybe the trigger is already pulled and the first shot is being fired,” said state Rep. John Siptroth, D-Monroe.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government recommended that financial services companies establish backup sites and devise “business continuity” plans to safeguard their operations against terrorists and be able to resume transactions as early as two hours after an attack.

Boosters say northeastern Pennsylvania, some 80 miles west of New York, is far enough away that it would not be affected by an attack, but close enough to allow for real-time transmission of data over fiber-optic lines — a critical requirement of the financial sector.

The nine counties involved in the Wall Street West program were chosen because they could potentially be reached by 125 miles of fiber, the distance at which data transmission becomes less than instantaneous. The counties are Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Monroe, Carbon, Pike, Wayne, Luzerne and Lackawanna.

Separate power grid
The region also is served by a different power grid, transportation network and watershed than New York, as called for in guidelines issued jointly by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said that while the financial sector has already taken many steps to protect itself, more can be done. “Your electrical system can go down, your water supply can be poisoned, your transportation system can be disrupted,” he said.

The first of the “Wall Street West” projects, the 300,000-square-foot Penn Regional Business Center in Monroe County, is scheduled to break ground in June. Developer Larry Simon plans to build a total of nearly 5 million square feet of office space.

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