Kansas City, Mo. ? Metropolitan Kansas City has become the 35th major urban area to be wired to a secure Internet network that allows instant exchanges of information on terrorism, catastrophes and other safety threats.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, in a visit Friday to the city’s Emergency Operations Center, said the network “adds another level of communication that is real-time and minute by minute, if it needs to be, between the federal government and local governments.”

The new Homeland Security Information Network will be expanded by midsummer to all states and 50 major urban centers. Thirty-eight states have been connected to the network so far. Missouri’s other major city — St. Louis — was one of the first urban areas to be added to the system.

Ridge said his department had previously established secure telephone connections with governors, individual states’ homeland security advisers and other officials at the state level to provide updates and advice about terrorism.

“Information, intelligence, is at the heart of what we do,” Ridge said. “If we get the right information on a timely basis and act on it, we truly believe we can deter terrorist attacks.”

On a computer screen, the network looks like an Internet bulletin board with the subject lines of queries and messages posted by public safety agencies.

George Meranic, director of the network, pointed to an incident report posted by authorities in the Baltimore area. Within minutes, authorities in Las Vegas and New York City had posted responses, “possibly with relevant information,” Meranic said.

Also posted are the texts of unclassified daily briefings from certain agencies — such as a recent one from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that began with news of this week’s flooding in Kansas City and surrounding areas.

Ridge also outlined another Homeland Security initiative aimed at easing communications at major disasters, where the equipment used by police and firefighters from different communities may be incompatible.

A new office within the Homeland Security Department is preparing to take bids on a kind of transmitter being developed that will funnel calls made on various kinds of phones and radios into a synthesizer and return them, solving the problem of incompatible frequencies.