Emergency mail delivery tomorrow

About 52,000 Philadelphia homes will receive empty cardboard boxes from mail carriers tomorrow.

The deliveries are part of an emergency-preparedness exercise to test the capacity to deliver emergency medications directly to people's homes in case of a bioterrorist attack.

Forty-eight teams, each including a postal worker and a Philadelphia police officer, will begin about 7 a.m. distributing the empty boxes that represent emergency medications. The exercise is expected to end about 4:30 p.m., and will cover an area that includes the Germantown (19144), Fairmount (19130) and Boulevard (19149) ZIP codes. Police officers are included in the exercise because in an emergency they would provide security for the carrier and medication.

The delivery drill is part of the federal government's Cities Readiness Initiative, a pilot program to help cities deliver emergency medical supplies in the event of a large-scale public- health crisis, such as a bioterrorist attack, nuclear accident or disease outbreak. *