“
...laminated glass enables broken glass fragments to adhere to a plastic layer rather than spraying building occupants with harmful glass shards...”
Containment chambers are
therefore becoming a widely used option in airports where evacuation is costly and often unnecessary because of the number of false positives thrown up by the screening processes. Containment chambers allow an IED to be transported safely away from a populated site to somewhere it can be dealt with in a safe environment, and also allows for
Containment chambers are
designed to balance the needs of quashing a blast of a particular size, made by an increasing variety of explosive charges and mixes, with its mobility. In military and some civilian arenas, the route for clearance of IEDs would be too varied for containment but, at an airport, a static containment chamber may not necessarily be an encumbrance. As it can be integrated into the scanning process, something like a suitcase containing a potential IED can be immediately channelled into the chamber, the door shut and the whole package moved off site, while airport traffic and business continues as normal. If an airport has no containment procedure, it would have to evacuate whenever something looks suspicious, whether a real threat or false alarm. While one chamber may not solve multiple threats and other aspects of an attack, it at least provides the chance for single devices to be contained for as long as needed until help arrives. But there are objections. Because
moving explosive devices risks setting them off, putting them in a blast- proof trash container or covering them with a bomb blanket or other similar means of mitigation may be seen as further complicating the bomb technicians’ job. There are also problems with
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valuable evidence to be gathered. The argument for containment is that it would instantly avoid costly and disruptive clean-up and airport closure. According to David Christian of AIGIS Blast Protection, it is often better to deal with an IED on-site, but in a civilian setting like an airport, the rules change. “In Baghdad, you can shut down a street to deal with the threat relatively easily without too much disruption. In an airport, such as Terminal 5 at Heathrow, it would cause massive financial and practical upheaval to evacuate the whole terminal. So, in the former example, the containment chamber is not really needed; in the latter it most definitely is if you are to save massive upheaval.”
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handling. According to explosives expert Sidney Alford, “This is the one thing that a professional bomb squad operator tries to avoid. Before it can be dealt with it has to be further handled – albeit very probably by a robot – in order to get it out of the container before it can be dismantled or otherwise disposed of.” It is also now possible for IEDs to be made to defy traditional methods of on-site destruction – such as disrupters - by installing novel detonators or adding toxic or radioactive material. Things also get difficult with
devices which are big and powerful enough to breach the container if they explode, so chamber design is all-important to prevent them actually making the effects of the explosion worse. It may be argued that most suspect devices would be less than
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2.5kg (more than sufficient to down an aircraft), and therefore a compact containment chamber which works alongside the screening equipment could be deployed effectively. But in incidents where the terminal itself is targeted, a larger device may have to be dealt with.
Blast Mitigation in Structures The protection of buildings involves the incorporation of blast-proof materials to suppress flash fires, blasts, shocks, and blast impuls- es, and help reduce the effects from bomb fragments, shrapnel and projectiles. The materials work by reducing the over-pressure and reflected shock waves through the
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use of special coatings and filler materials to minimise the effect of bomb explosions. Masonry walls with matrix of steel reinforcement are more resistant to the effects of spalling following an explosion. The AIGIS TABREshield provides a thin section, lightweight non-struc- tural cladding solution where mas- sive, heavy structures, such as blast walls, or extensive reinforcement of building are either impractical or untenable. Shatterproof glass is a vital
CIP component as many injuries are caused by flying glass in an explosion, and UK-based companies have experience from attacks in Northern Ireland in the creation of new window systems. Following reviews of shatterproof materials in which their efficacy was
June 2010 Aviationsecurityinternational
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