Posted on 10/23/2004 8:41:05 PM PDT by naturalman1975
Five seconds is all it would take. It would start with a five-tonne bomb exploding in the centre of an Australian city.
Shrapnel, glass and debris would be hurled up to 250 metres. The truck carrying the bomb would break into 10,000 one-kilogram pieces. Two buildings would collapse. The human toll: 900 dead, 9500 injured.
These are the frightening results of a computer simulation of a large bomb attack in a generic Australian city, described to participants at the two-day Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers conference held in Melbourne this week.
The simulation, using "conservative" population figures, modelled the physical impact of the bomb on the surrounding buildings and people.
"But in five seconds, because that's how long it's going to take those buildings to fall down, bang - the middle of an Australian city - 900 people dead, some 9500 injured," said Don Williams, of the security risk management company XTEK Consulting Services. "How many of the 9500 are going to die? Quite a lot." Advertisement Advertisement
Mr Williams spent 20 years in an army bomb disposal unit, and was the Sydney Olympic Games bomb risk manager.
The simulation showed that at least two, and possibly four, buildings would collapse as a result of the bomb.
"We also worked out that the truck would break into nice pieces of frag (fragments), around about 10,000 of them, and the average weight of a piece of frag would be about a kilogram."
Mr Williams said there was nothing to indicate that Australia was at risk of such an attack, but noted that there "are any number of reasons" why there could be a bombing in Australia. He said many people either had explosives knowledge or could get it off the internet.
He also said bomb-making material and explosives were extensively used in industries such as mining.
The bomb simulation was originally developed for a bomb technicians' conference late last year, but the findings had since been shared more widely with groups likely to be involved in disaster recovery.
Speaking afterwards, Mr Williams said the simulation showed that Australia did not have the medical resources to cope with such a huge disaster.
"We can't afford a medical structure based on that very unlikely scenario," he said. "What we should be doing is accepting the fact we can't deal with it, then asking some very hard questions about what we are going to do.
"How do you decide which people get treated? How do you decide which people get moved?
"In Bali, we were able to fly most people to Darwin and then most of them to their home cities. In this scenario we're talking about flying people out of their home city."
Mr Williams stressed that the exercise was based on "a mythical bomb in a mythical city".
"We really wanted to see the impact of a large bomb in an urban environment without a warning," he said.
"We said, let's take it up a notch and model something that we haven't seen yet, which was a five-tonne bomb. There is no indication that we are ever likely to see that.
"In fact, it would be difficult to build. The bombings we have seen are mainly in the couple of hundred kilograms range - up to 600 kilograms."
If the Sun suddenly crashed into the Earth it would be bad I bet......
A meteor or comet would ruin your day, too, but they are harder to stop.
No problem, mate. Just a bloody nuisance, what?
ping
The Sun would eat the Earth up for sure.
Hear, hear!
People always about intelligence failures, and very few ever consider that you hardly ever hear anything about the things that get stopped.
I don't think most cement-and-steel buildings would be as affected by the blast as the Murrah building was. It had a large alcove facing the blast; most of the destroyed area was above this alcove. If a building had a marquee but mothing important structurally over it, a blast would probably destroy the marquee pretty thoroughly, but its failure would not affect the rest of the structure.
While I'm at it, here are some links to some relevant episodes from one of
the VERY few bright lights of our Public Broadcasting System (PBS):
"Frontline".
First, the website for the episode tracing the actions of Ressam, the
terrorist foiled in his attempt to bomb LAX (Los Angeles International Airport).
I checked this and a few other sources...but the lady US Customs agent who
sniffed out Ressam when he tried to enter the USA at Port Angeles, Washington
is un-named. Probably not a bad idea...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/trail/
And the story of FBI agent John O'Neill (not the fellow contending with Kerry).
And how he tried and tried and tried to get his higher-ups (not superiors!!!) to
pay attention to this guy, Osama bin Laden.
Then finally gave up and took his last job...where he died on 9-11doing security
at The World Trade Center (surely one of the greatest, saddest ironies
of the War on Terror).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/
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