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(Source enr.com - Date 3/23/03)

By Judy Schriener

(A shorter version of this story is in the Nov. 5 issue of ENR.)

Security may be on everyone’s mind since Sept. 11, but taking actions to protect the nation’s infrastructure won’t be easy and it won’t come quickly. Among the challenges are that no one knows what kind of threats are likely to come along, making it difficult to prevent them. Attacks could come in the form of physical assaults, chemicals or biohazards, or aftereffects of any kind of disaster.

Key suggestions from a cross-industry group meeting last month in Washington, D.C., ran the gamut from high-technology upgrades and systems-oriented design to manual techniques characteristic of developing countries.

"Risk management is going to take on a new meaning" from now on, said Roger Flanagan, professor of construction management at the U.K.’s University of Reading. "We haven’t really begun with this yet."

Roger Flanagan

He joined nearly 150 attendees at the Oct. 23-24 conference, "Designing and Managing Vulnerability," sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Civil Engineering Research Foundation’s Corporate Advisory Board and the Building Futures Council.

The challenge is to keep the public interested long-term. "It’s a constant public information blitz that has to go on, and people lose interest a couple of months after a disaster and funds dry up," said Charles H. Thornton, chairman of the Thornton-Tomasetti Group Inc., New York City. "We can’t even get the public interested in life cycle costing," noted Robert Crist, vice president of operations for the water sector of Black & Veatch.

Protecting people, buildings and infrastructure now needs to involve more communication among officials and databases of organizations that typically haven’t interacted before, such as law enforcement and emergency response agencies, construction companies and trade groups and state and local governments, said several industry experts. Common protocols for databases would help so they can "talk" to each other, they added.

Also, taking an interdisciplinary approach during the design process would enable designers from several disciplines to interact, bounce ideas off of each other and work together to come up with system-wide approaches to designing to enhance vulnerability. "The design bases we’ve been designing to for years are inadequate," claimed Bernie Meyers, senior vice president of Bechtel National Inc.

Infrastructure could use more technology to automatically sense and counter problems, such as chemical or biohazard contaminant, conferees said. Solutions are "very expensive and very difficult to retrofit," although there are some good off-the-shelf technologies, said Ed Link, deputy chief of staff for R&D at the Army Corps of Engineers. "It’s paradoxical that now we want to find ways not to move air," should an unsafe element be detected, he said.

Another solution, brought up in a roundtable discussion, may be to decentralize and go low-tech to the extent that every home and business have small-scale emergency power generators and water supplies, like they do in developing countries.

Most power and water plants have little security, but that is changing as potential threats abound. Whether isolating facilities or interweaving their systems with others best ensures protection when they’re under siege is not clear at this point. "The $64 question is, do you harden facilities or get more interconnected," wondered Ed Richardson, senior vice president of Bechtel Corp.

Another challenge is the sudden moratorium on sharing information publicly or with other professionals for fear of it getting into the wrong hands. "For the first time in my career…there’s information we can’t share," said Jim Pendergast, special assistant to the interim director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Protection Task Force.

Brian Ramaley, director of Newport News Waterworks, said that since Sept. 11, the focus of the Water Sector Critical Infrastructure Protection Advisory Committee, which he chairs, has changed.

"Generally, water systems are unlikely targets" for biohazard contaminants, because of the large volume of water, less than 1% of which is actually consumed. Also, systems are designed to chemically remove and disinfect contaminants, he noted. "Radiological and chemical attacks are perhaps more problematic," he said. "Distribution systems are perhaps our most valuable assets," but developing any sort of protection system on a massive scale is difficult because the plants are not cookie-cutter so each system has to be dealt with individually. "It’s a daunting task," he said.

The question then arises as to what to test for. "That’s a tough question," Ramaley said. People might not know the difference between a perceived problem, such as rust, which is essentially harmless but looks bad, versus, something lethal that cannot be seen. "Many potential threats are not visible," he said.

Some water facilities are using unconventional methods to try to protect themselves, said Ramaley. Some are getting their meter readers involved, training them to spot and report any unusual or suspicious behavior as they make their daily rounds. "We’re even looking at fish-stocking procedures in our reservoirs" as a barometer of trouble, he said. The only problem with that is accurately determining why the fish died. "It could be old age, and you don’t want to cause a panic."

Ramaley noted that the EPA had just awarded a $600-million grant to the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies to implement an information sharing and analysis center for the water sector. Also, a few days after the conference, New York City’s Dept. of Environmental Protection awarded a $30-million contract to the Corps of Engineers to design a security system for the city’s 1,972-sq-mi watershed. It will include an early detection system for chemical and biological contaminants.

In buildings, some of the retrofits may be doable but not practical from an owner’s point of view. "If you mandate a retrofit and the retrofit costs more than the building is worth, the owner could take a walk and you end up with a slum," says Thornton.

Christine Johnson

Before Sept. 11, "we rarely thought about using money to protect what we have" in the way of roads, bridges and tunnels, said Christine Johnson, program manager, operations, and director, Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office for the U.S. Dept. of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration. About 40% of terrorist attacks are on transportation facilities, mainly bridges, she said.

She cited a recent survey, now classified, of all 50 states’ infrastructure needs. "Some states are, frankly, doing very little," says Johnson. Those states are not sure what to do or their resources are otherwise engaged, she said. Others are training cameras on bridges or even posting guards or sending people out two or three times a day to visually inspect them.

"Our greater vulnerability is in the aftermath of a disaster," said Johnson. "The mass evacuation that has to take place in minutes can be very problematic." She suggested not just "tabletop exercises" but also live drills.

That brings up the question of the intent of the design. Possibly the primary purpose of certain roadways should be to provide a lifeline or a way for people to get out, rather than to take people from place to place, said Ben Schwegler, vice president and chief scientist for Walt Disney Imagineering, Research & Development Inc. Conferees also noted that redundancy in the form of parallel or alternate roads were a way of decentralizing roadways, much like the Internet by its decentralization is inherently protected against a single-point attack.

Similarly, some designers noted that things can be done to better manage the consequences of extreme events. For example, instead of plastering instructions everywhere not to use elevators in case of emergency, it would be better to design elevators to quickly move people from high floors to the ground floor in emergencies. Stairwells need to have nonstick surfaces and good lighting with backup systems, noted Neil Higgins, principal and founder of Applied Research Associates Inc.

Power lines can stretch up to 800 miles between substations, so shortening that distance would help, suggested Donald Mundy, vice president in the power delivery division of Black & Veatch. Building redundant facilities also would help prevent failures, which cost the U.S. $26 billion annually, he added.

Other countries and industries also may provide new solutions, conferees said. Flanagan noted a super strong paint developed in Japan that was designed to bind buildings during seismic activity. "Their problem is earthquakes, our problem is terrorism, but the impact is the same," he said.

Flanagan also noted that The DuPont Corp.’s Kevlar material, used in bulletproof vests, could be adapted as an admixture to concrete and other materials as a strengthener. DuPont already is moving in that direction, said Jim Ranson, Kevlar business development manager."We are beginning to work now toward more systems-oriented solutions," he says.

Jack Snell, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Building and Fire Research Laboratory, also called for discussions with disaster survivors "to find out why they made it and others didn’t" and incorporate those findings into design and emergency plans, he says.

CERF President Harvey Bernstein says conference findings will be provided to industry groups, the Infrastructure Security Partnership and administration’s Homeland Security office.

Photos by Judy Schriener

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