Register Now For… Partnering for a Safer Nation: 2008 Homeland Security S&T Stakeholders Conference–East June 2–5, 2008 Washington, D.C. The conference is presented by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), with subject matter support provided by the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. The theme for the event is “Partnering for a Safer Nation.” The four-day agenda and training workshops will focus on the future of the S&T Directorate, while highlighting the collaborations being built at home and around the world to secure America. For more information, visit www.ndia.org/meetings/8680.

A Hole New Way

Move over, drills, saws, and jackhammers. Now there’s something quicker and easier for search-and-rescue missions.

Click here to view a short video clip of the race between the CIRT and traditional… dare we say, slower… methods.

It’s called the Controlled Impact Rescue Tool (CIRT). And, although it’s still in development, a prototype is showing that it can bust through thick concrete walls or barriers in about half the time of traditional methods. The CIRT can mean all the difference when people are trapped inside wrecked buildings. First responders might have to rush to quickly get them out, or simply to provide lifesaving supplies. This new technology also performs the job without producing a lot of harmful dust that typically comes with using a concrete saw.

Funded by the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate and designed by Raytheon Company, the CIRT is carried and operated by two people. It uses a blank ammunition cartridge designed for a standard hunting rifle—driving a piston—that, when fired, generates a high-energy jolt. No hoses or cords are required, and it can be loaded to fire as often as two rounds every minute. At 36 inches long and 16 inches in diameter, it weighs all of 105 pounds—light enough to hold up against a wall, yet heavy enough to limit recoil action that can cause injuries.

Earlier this year, during a test at a fire-and-rescue training facility in Virginia, the CIRT went head-to-head against other, traditional rescue methods. It was a race to break through a vertical, 5½-inch slab of steel-reinforced concrete and create a hole 18 inches wide (see video clip). CIRT won with a time of about 13 minutes, compared with 29 minutes or more for the others. Based on similar testing, the tool has also shown that it can bust through a horizontal slab in about 10 to 12 minutes.

“In less than 16 months, we’ve achieved our initial goal to reduce the CIRT’s breach time to less than 20 minutes,” said Jalal Mapar, who manages the project at the S&T Directorate’s Infrastructure and Geophysical Division. “Over the next 12 months, we’ll refine the design to make it even more affordable for production. We really believe this can be the embodiment of a faster, better, cheaper, and safer technology for the urban search-and-rescue community across the nation.”

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Unraveling the Net

In our post–9/11 world, much effort has been put toward protecting against and preventing future terrorist attacks. But, understanding the very origins of radicalization well enough to stem violent extremism at its source—indeed, prevention at the most basic level—is still a burgeoning field of study.

Studying how terrorist groups form, recruit, and persist is a major focus of the DHS-funded START Center of Excellence.

An academic center sponsored by the DHS S&T Directorate is making headway. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a DHS Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland, uses state-of-the-art theories, methods, and data from the social and behavioral sciences in an attempt to understand terrorism and its roots. START asks: What reasoning can be used to deprive violent extremists of recruits? How can communities undermine sympathy for terrorists and better anticipate terrorist actions? And what can be done to improve the public’s resilience to attacks?

Quite an agenda. And START’s biggest—or at least its most visible—success to date is a massive terrorism online database now open to the public. The unclassified Global Terrorism Database (GTD) allows anyone to look through the public rap sheet on more than 80,000 incidents of terrorism around the world, dating back to 1970, a critical tool for researchers and counterterrorism experts alike. The GTD outlines more than 30,000 bombings, 13,400 assassinations, and 3,200 kidnappings carried out by individuals or groups with agendas across the full political and social spectra. The searchable database also sorts the incidents by more than 100 variables, ranging from the type of perpetrator to the type of weapon used and the number of injuries incurred. From this information, experts can use the GTD to examine short- and long-term trends of terrorism, and help to understand radical groups and movements.

But START does more. The center also looks at why any one person or group becomes engaged in terrorism, exploring factors such as personal values, organizational ideologies, and links between terrorism and other behavior, including criminal. It benefits from the breadth of perspectives and research methods of its staff, which includes criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, geographers, historians, psychiatrists, economists, and public health experts.

START focuses, too, on sources of support for terrorist groups and the impacts of local, national, and international counterterrorist strategies on terrorist behavior. It also looks at societal responses to terrorist threats and attacks, focusing on perceptions of, preparations for, responses to, and recovery from incidents.

In addition, through regular reports and briefings, START shares its findings, offering empirically grounded insights on specific topics as they relate to understanding the human causes and consequences of terrorism. For instance, Support for the Caliphate and Radical Mobilization is a recent release by Douglas McLeod and Frank Hairgrove of the University of Wisconsin. It’s an academic overview of efforts by terrorists to establish a worldwide religious and political leader who would support radical viewpoints and actions. The researchers examine how this form of temporal and spiritual government could be misused as a catalyst for terrorism.

“As a Center of Excellence, we’re developing an interdisciplinary subculture in the study of terrorism,” said Kathleen Smarick, executive director of START and a researcher herself. “That gives us our edge and our expertise. It is how we’ll begin to get a grasp on the slippery issues of extremism and radicalization.”

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Hearing Hurricanes

David Chandler, MIT News Office
April 9, 2008

Knowing how powerful a hurricane is, before it hits land, can help to save lives or to avoid the enormous costs of an unnecessary evacuation. Some MIT researchers think there may be a better, cheaper way of getting that crucial information.

Click here to listen to an enhanced, but very low-frequency, audio version of the underwater sound of 1999’s Hurricane Gert (above, in a colorized infrared image, courtesy of NOAA).

So far, there’s only one surefire way of measuring the strength of a hurricane: Sending airplanes to fly right through the most intense winds and into the eye of the storm, carrying out wind-speed measurements as they go.

That’s an expensive approach—the specialized planes used for hurricane monitoring cost about $100 million each, and a single flight costs about $50,000. Monitoring one approaching hurricane can easily require a dozen such flights, and so only storms that are approaching U.S. shores get such monitoring, even though the strongest storms occur in the Pacific basin (where they are known as tropical cyclones).

Nicholas Makris, associate professor of mechanical and ocean engineering and director of MIT’s Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing, thinks there may be a better way. By placing hydrophones (underwater microphones) deep below the surface in the path of an oncoming hurricane, it’s possible to measure wind power as a function of the intensity of the sound. The roiling action of the wind, churning up waves and turning the water into a bubble-filled froth, causes a rushing sound whose volume is a direct indicator of the storm’s destructive power.

Makris has been doing theoretical work analyzing this potential method for years, triggered by a conversation he had with MIT professor and hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. But now he has found the first piece of direct data that confirms his calculations. In a paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, Makris and his former graduate student Joshua Wilson show that Hurricane Gert, in 1999, happened to pass nearly over a hydrophone anchored 800 meters deep above the mid-Atlantic Ridge at about the latitude of Puerto Rico, and the same storm was monitored by airplanes within the next 24 hours.

An acoustic sensor key to the joint MIT-Mexico hurricane research is deployed off the coast of Isla Socorro by crew members of the Mexican Research Vessel Altair.

The case produced exactly the results that had been predicted, providing the first experimental validation of the method, Makris said. “There was almost a perfect relationship between the power of the wind and the power of the wind-generated noise,” he said. There was less than 5 percent error—about the same as the errors you get from aircraft measurements.

Satellite monitoring is good at showing the track of a hurricane, Makris said, but not as reliable as aircraft in determining destructive power.

The current warning systems are estimated to save $2.5 billion a year in the United States, and improved systems could save even more, he said. And since many parts of the world that are subject to devastating cyclones cannot afford the cost of hurricane-monitoring aircraft, the potential for saving lives and preventing devastating damage is even greater elsewhere.

“You need to know, do you evacuate or not?” Makris explained. “Both ways, if you get it wrong, there can be big problems.”

To that end, Makris has been collaborating with the Mexican Navy’s Directorate of Oceanography, Hydrography and Meteorology, using a meteorological station on the island of Socorro, off Mexico’s west coast. The island lies in one of the world’s most hurricane-prone areas—an average of three cyclones pass over or near the island every year. The team installed a hydrophone in waters close to the island and is waiting for a storm to come by and provide further validation of the technique.

Makris and Wilson estimate that when there’s a hurricane on its way toward shore, a line of acoustic sensors could be dropped from a small plane into the ocean ahead of the storm’s path, while conditions are still safe, and could then provide detailed information on the storm’s strength to aid in planning and decision-making about possible evacuations. The total cost for such a deployment would be a small fraction of the cost of even a single flight into the storm, they figure.

In addition, permanent lines of such sensors could be deployed offshore in storm-prone areas, such as the Sea of Bengal off India and Bangladesh. And such undersea monitors could have additional benefits besides warning of coming storms.

The hydrophones could be a very effective way of monitoring the amount of sea salt entering the atmosphere as a result of the churning of ocean waves. This sea salt, it turns out, has a major impact on global climate because it scatters solar radiation that regulates the formation of clouds. Direct measurements of this process could help climate modelers to make more accurate estimates of its effects.

The research has been supported by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, ONR Global-Americas, MIT Sea Grant and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.

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End of the Line

When duty calls, the fleet of PHILIS trucks and trailers can rush into action, delivering a high-tech lab and a team of experts.

Since Snapshots told you about PHILIS, the fleet of mobile chemical-analysis labs (“Science on Wheels,” October 2007), the DHS S&T Directorate has finished delivering the last of the planned high-tech trucks and trailers to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Transaction complete… thus bringing to a close what is the first start-to-finish product assigned to the Directorate during the early DHS days in 2003. A total of nine vehicles are now in the hands of EPA, each fully equipped to staff a team of scientists and engineers in the event of a manmade or accidental chemical release.

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Common Ground

In a large building or wildlfire situation, heavy smoke can quickly become disorienting, putting firefighters in danger. Battalion Chief Steve Nash of the Solon (OH) Fire Department knows that firsthand. “Our biggest fear is losing someone in those buildings,” said Nash, “so we had to come up with a method to prevent us from getting disoriented.”

Photo and caption credit: Halcyon Products.

Firefighters have made use of inexpensive compasses in the past, but they cannot be easily seen in the dark and have no way to mark points of entry or the location of the Incident Command Post.

“I wanted everybody on fire ground to have the same relation on where the building sits, where command is located, and where team members are,” said Nash. He drew some ideas on paper and took them to his colleague, John Moore, at Halcyon Products. The company was already in the business of making better, safer products for first responders.

“About the same time I came up with the drawings, I found the TechSolutions Web site (www.dhs.gov/techsolutions) through Fire Chief Magazine and made the necessary contacts,” said Nash.

TechSolutions is a new program of the DHS S&T Directorate. The TechSolutions Program was established to provide technology solutions that address mission capability gaps identified by active federal, tribal, state, and local first responders. TechSolutions assists with rapid prototyping of technologies that need additional development in order to get them ready for commercialization. Currently, the TechSolutions Program is developing solutions to many gaps identified by the first responder community, including the Fireground Compass.

Nash and Moore conducted focus groups with firefighters and solicited their thoughts and opinions on the product. “That helped us determine whether the idea was valid to some degree, directed us on product features, function and design, provided input on price points, and gave us a lot of feedback that led us to believe we were going in the right direction,” said Moore.

The Fireground Compass is simple to use, combining a compass with rotating bezels. It has a “building bezel” with four points labeled A-B-C-D, which corresponds to the way firefighters label the sides of a building. The bezel rotates, and the compass is oriented north. As a result, all users have the same perspective. A separate “command bezel” indicates, with an arrow, either where the Incident Command Post is, or where the user entered the building.

“It’s very easy to get lost in a smoky environment and knowing where you are is the difference between getting out and not getting out. This device will get me situated so I can find where I entered the building, find my hose line, or find an exit door or window,” said Nash. The compass also has an LED light, making it easy to read in dark and smoky conditions. The compass is very large, making it easy for firefighters to use with their gloves on. “We wanted people to be able to utilize this with gear on, and not go into a building and take their gloves off,” Nash said.

According to Greg Price, who directs the TechSolutions Program, the Fireground Compass is the first TechSolutions product designed by a first responder to go through the entire TechSolutions development path. Many more products are in the works through partnerships with the federal interagency Technical Support Working Group and others.

TechSolutions and Halcyon Products hope the product will be commercially available within the next few months. They also want it to be affordable for anyone who needs one.

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S&T Snapshots is a monthly newsletter produced by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate in partnership with the Homeland Security Institute. HSI is a Studies and Analysis Federally Funded Research and Development Center.