Marathon is security challenge

New York City plans huge effort just days after truck attack.

In a city shaken NEW YORK — by its deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11, police are promising an unprecedented security effort to try to secure a soft target spanning five boroughs and 26.2 miles: the New York City Marathon.

City officials have sought to calm the nerves of more than 50,000 runners and huge crowds of onlookers expected to line the mar- athon route by insisting it should go off Sunday with- out a hitch only days after a truck attack killed eight people in lower Manhattan.

The security detail will include hundreds of extra uniformed patrol and plainclothes officers, roving teams of counterterrorism com- mandos armed with heavy weapons, bomb-sniffing dogs and rooftop snipers poised to shoot if a threat emerges.

The New York Police Department is also turning to a tactic it has used to protect Trump Tower and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: 16-ton sanitation trucks filled with sand. The trucks, along with “blocker cars,” will be positioned at key intersections to try ro prevent anyone from driv- ing onto the course.

The Police Department said it has no information pointing to any credible threat against the race.

There is no question, though, that the course provides a security challenge.

The race heads through residential neighborhoods with hundreds of spots where an attacker could steer a vehi- cle onto the thickly packed course. Streets leading to the course are closed, but on many of them, in most years, the only barrier is a blue, wooden sawhorse and a thin plastic tape.

“It will be an extraordinary event, as it always is,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference. “It will be well protected, as it always is.”