In an effort Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called “Herculean,” the city of New York has laid out a plan to help city residents hose out their soiled pants after a week of wildly speculative warnings about possible attacks on the cities’ subways.

“This won’t be easy,” Bloomberg said at a press conference on Thursday. “We all thought we had a credible threat, a specific threat; we arrested some Arabs and flooded the subway system with cops, and it turned out we had nothing. Now it’s our somber duty to get some detergent and bleach and help the citizens of New York scoop the crap out of their pants.”

The plan includes reimbursement of city laundromats that let New Yorkers use their facilities for free, and dispersing city officials and celebrities to clean-up sites to turn the shame of soiling oneself into “patriotic pride.” Yankee’s star Derrick Jeter and former mayor Rudy Guiliani head the list of spokespeople for the campaign, which the city has dubbed “Down with Brown ‘05”.

City sanitation officials have already received HazMat equipment from the National Guard and are plumbing the subway system with bilge-pumps. The subways were hardest hit by the tsunami of excreta, flooded with four to five feet of human waste. The excess fecal matter will be pumped into the Hudson River. Enterprising street-vendors stationed at Ground Zero have already started selling jars of feces labeled “10/9/05: Never Forget.”

Most New Yorkers, realizing they live in one of the most attractive targets for terrorism, have become savvy enough to distinguish a credible warning from a fake one and were unsure whether to soil themselves or not. This changed Friday night when Mayor Bloomberg appeared at a press conference and screamed “You think this is a game? You think this is a motherfucking game? There are bombs in that subway now strapped to rats! 50 megatons each, set to detonate by remote in a chain reaction! Kiss your asses goodbye! Game over, man! Game fucking over!”

New York’s terror threat level was briefly raised to red following the press conference, when the sound of the city collectively defecating itself was mistaken for the sound of a nuclear bomb-blast.

When asked if his comments were a little shrill, Mayor Bloomberg blushed. “I’d rather have the city ruin a perfectly good pair of pants than fall asleep on the fact that we are confronted with the challenges of a war on terrorism every single day.”

“Man, I cannot take this much longer,” said subway sanitation worker Jolie Combs, “After that stuff in London this summer, people would mess the seats a little, and then they put all these cops down here lookin’ at baby carriages and such and then they get nervous on TV and the whole system’s flooded. They best better be paying me overtime for this. We’re dragging up shit in buckets. You know how many mop heads we’ve gone through? After a while, all you’re doing is just spreading the doo-doo around.”

The state Center for Disease Control has reported that it expects “1,000 to 2,000 deaths from the riptide of kaka all over the city,” a development that one CDC official labeled “sort of ironic.” The casualties are expected mostly from the cities poor and homeless.

“So it’s win-win,” Mayor Bloomberg said. Donning a surgical facemask and a push broom for a photo opportunity in Manhattan, he vowed that the subway system would be returned to “as relatively feces-free as it was before.” He commended New Yorkers “for their brilliant reaction in the face of my strategic fear-mongering.”