• Texas police building withstands gun attack, showing value of secure design

    Secure access points and the arrangement of rooms create a buffer between McKinney law enforcement officials and the public; windows sit just above eye level to prevent direct attack; they slope to limit ledges for explosive devices; bulletproof glass protects the lobby, and bullet-resistant liner lies inside the masonry walls

  • Small bridge sensors will give early warnings of anomalies, weaknesses

    University of Maryland researchers devised a lightweight, low-power, wireless, credit card-sized sensor that will detect weaknesses in bridges and other infrastructure before they can turn into calamities; the sensors would detect anomalies in the structure of even the most inaccessible parts of bridges and send alerts via cellular frequencies to its human masters. Among the things it would measure would be stress loads, vibration, temperature and the creation and growth of cracks

  • New levee design, construction materials tested in Louisiana

    Since Katrina, attention has been riveted on $14 billion worth of federal projects to rebuild the deficient hurricane levee system so it can better defend from surges out of lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain; the Army Corps of Engineers plans to start experimenting with a new construction method, which relies on a mix of lime and clay to build the test levee higher without widening the levee base; this method of raising existing river levees can be done faster than a standard raising and will not require buying additional land to expand the base; mixing lime and clay and water will not produce concrete, which has a measured strength of 3,000 pounds per square inch, or psi, the mixture will have a strength of 80 to 120 psi — substantially greater than the 3 to 5 psi of a compacted clay levee

  • Disaster response experts call for "red-helmet brigade"

    Experts say that the world need to be better prepared to respond to natural disasters such as the Pakistan floods of the Haiti earthquake; they say that an organization such as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs should establish a special response unit to set up a computerized database that identifies all available assets routinely needed in an emergency — emergency personnel, medical personnel, water, non-perishable food stuffs, extraction machinery, temporary shelters, and field hospitals; some supplies could be held in locations around the world, ready to be dispatched as soon as disaster assessment experts working for a central command and control center arrive on the scene of a catastrophe

  • China, Pakistan floods; Haiti earthquake: not merely "natural" disasters

    The recent disasters in Pakistan, China, and Haiti have done more than kill thousands and displace millions: they have raised questions about whether the modifier “natural” — as in “natural disaster” — is accurate in describing the sources and scope of the catastrophes; these and other recent disasters, in other words, raise questions about how much of the damage caused comes from the forces of nature and how much is the result of human activity; experts say that a major contributing factor to the scope of these disasters are development decisions which are too often controlled by wealthy and corrupt elites who have no interest in protecting people who have been marginalized by poverty

  • Chemical industry spends millions shaping chemical facilities security legislation

    Fourteen parent companies own chemical plants which endanger a large number of people in the United States in the event of an accident or attack on one of their chemical facilities; these 14 parent companies own 163 facilities in 37 different states and Puerto Rico; the facilities owned by The Clorox Company, Kuehne Chemical, and JCI Jones Chemical each put more than 12 million people at risk; these fourteen companies and their affiliated trade associations spent $69,286,198 lobbying the committees with jurisdiction over chemical security legislation in 2008 and 2009; the political action committees (PACs) of these fourteen companies and the PACs of their affiliated trade associations gave $2,187,868 in the 2008 election cycle and the 2010 cycle to date directly to the campaigns of members of the committees of jurisdiction over chemical security legislation

  • Pennsylvania's bridge structural deficiency rate is nearly double the national average

    There are 4,284 bridges in the 5-county Pittsburgh area, and 1,246 of them, or 29 percent, are rated structurally deficient; this means that at least one bridge element — its superstructure, substructure, or deck — was found by inspectors to be in poor or worse-than-poor condition; Pennsylvania’s 22 percent bridge structural deficiency rate is nearly double the national average

  • India tunnels under Himalayan peaks to keep up with China

    In the past decade, as China has furiously built up its military and civilian infrastructure on its side of the Himalayan border, but the Rohtang Pass on the Indian side has stood as silent testimony to India’s inability and unwillingness to master its far-flung and rugged outermost reaches; in June, India has began to change that by starting the ambitious project which will take five years and require boring five miles through the Pir Panjal range; several other tunnels, which would allow all-weather access to Ladakh, which abuts the Tibetan Plateau, are also in the works

  • Worry: Hackers can take over power plants

    In many cases, operating systems at power plants and other critical infrastructure are decades old; sometimes they are not completely separated from other computer networks used by companies to run administrative systems or even access the Internet; those links between the administrative networks and the control systems provide gateways for hackers to insert malicious codes, viruses, or worms into the programs that operate the plants

  • INL's International Symposium on Resilient Control Systems (ISRCS)

    Idaho National Laboratory is helping generate innovative research and codify resilience in next-generation control system designs by hosting the 3rd International Symposium on Resilient Control Systems in Idaho Falls 10-12 August; INL says it sponsors the symposium to support a multidisciplinary approach to the complex nature of control system interdependencies that ensure safe and secure operation of critical components of the U.S. infrastructure including electrical grids, water supplies, and transportation

  • Commerce Department seeks comments on cybersecurity and its impact on innovation

    The U.S. Commerce Department seeks comments from all stakeholders, including the commercial, academic and civil society sectors, on measures to improve cyber security while sustaining innovation; the department says that the Internet has become vitally important to U.S. innovation, prosperity, education, civic activity, and cultural life as well as aspects of America’s national security, and that a top priority of the department is to ensure that the Internet remains an open and trusted infrastructure, both for commercial entities and individuals

  • Smart Grid offers target-rich opportunities for hackers

    SCADA systems are vulnerable to hacking, but the smart grid is even more vulnerable; security experts at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week warned that the accelerated deployment of smart-grid technology could leave critical infrastructure and private homes vulnerable to hackers; hacking may come in a benign form — customers might simply figure out how to lower their electricity bills by manipulating how much energy their meters say they are using; hacking may also have more sinister aspects: large-scale attacks may also be possible, and the smart grid’s serious vulnerabilities make it possible to shut down the power supply to an entire city

  • Good business: Developers make buildings more disaster-secure than building code requires

    A Florida developer hopes to get more business by making his building hurricane-proof; with debris-resistant windows on all thirty-five of its stories, the developer says the building would withstand a Category 5 hurricane without significant damage; the extra hurricane proofing built into the Miami building shows that sometimes the private market can overtake the public sector when it comes to building design and safety standards; for example, in New York and Washington, D.C., some developers have put in anti-terrorism safeguards that exceed building codes

  • Chemical industry welcomes extension of current chemical facilities security measure

    The U.S. chemical industry breathes a sigh of relief: a senate panel votes unanimously to extend current chemical facilities security law to 4 October 2013; the industry worried about modifications to the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act of 2009 (CFATS) which would make the measure more stringent — for example, by requiring the chemical plants replace the more toxic and volatile chemicals they use with inherently safer technologies, or IST

  • Senate panels to discuss high-risk chemical facilities

    This is an important week in chemical facilities security legislation, as two Senate panels are set to hold hearings on how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and DHS can most effectively monitor the security measures taken by U.S. chemical facilities: