Safeguarding Infrastructure // by Christopher Doyle
bridges. There are currently forty-four cable-stayed bridges in the United States, and they are becoming more popular as an economical construction type for long-span bridges. The first step in the project is to determine which bridges and which materials are most vulnerable. In controlled experiments, the research team has been recreating the structural forces holding up these bridges and destroying samples of their cables using various types of explosives. They use sophisticated software to analyze the impacts and results. Cables are tensioned just like on a real bridge to see just how they might react during an actual terrorist event.
Withstanding wildfires
Following the wildfires in Southern California last October, in which some 3,200 homes were destroyed, IGD dispatched a team of scientists, researchers, and responders to talk with incident commanders at the highest levels of the state’s fire service. The team was there to evaluate the need for solutions. What they learned from these discussions focused on tools to improve situational awareness and models that will assist in prediction, so that overall incident management can be achieved more quickly and with more precision. This effort confirmed the need for a unifying architecture to support the various information-technology applications that incident commanders run — each needs to understand the input and output of the other.
It was also clear from this fact-finding mission that there is much left to be done in the area of protecting individual homes. IGD is pursuing a concept that would deploy a fire-retardant material, much as a parachute would, over a home to block embers and prevent firebrands from landing on it. These embers can easily ignite combustible roofs, or they can blow into gable vents or roof eaves and ignite the home through the attic.
Locating and tracking
For incident commanders and first responders alike, the Holy Grail is a technology that can locate and track people and things inside structures. The urban environments of today, however — with steel and concrete, multiple transmission signals including cellular phones and Wi-Fi signals — has made a tracking solution elusive. GPS units will provide a latitude and longitude inside buildings, but cannot provide an elevation which is essential to knowing where, inside a sixty-story building, a responder is located. IGD has been working with L-3 Communications to tackle this physics challenge by combining several types of technologies into one tracking solution. Using things like GPS, Inertial Navigation
