Until a suspected terrorist plot was revealed, few people even knew there was a pipeline of highly combustible jet fuel snaking beneath the nation’s largest city.<\/p>\n
But authorities said Monday that it’s one of countless lesser-known targets – including waterway retaining walls, dingy rail yards and tunnel ventilation systems – that they struggle to protect from attacks.<\/p>\n
New York police spend “considerable time and resources protecting the landmarks nearly everyone would recognize as emblematic of New York and America,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “But we also protect the anonymous, unheralded elements of infrastructure that are essential to the life of the city.”<\/p>\n
Police were aware that the fuel system feeding John F. Kennedy International Airport posed a risk well before investigators unearthed an alleged conspiracy by a homegrown Muslim terror cell to blow it up, with the goal of killing thousands of people and inflicting major damage on the U.S. economy.<\/p>\n