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Sinking to Their Level: Protecting Municipal Infrastructure

Dr. Irwin Pikus says simple solutions exist for securing underground infrastructure. Why aren't those measures being put in place?

By Dr. Irwin Pikus

February 10, 2010 — CSO —

Since the September 11 attacks nine years ago, and with each subsequent presumed breach in security both in the US and abroad, new measures are taken with new priorities coming to the fore, all designed to heighten our awareness and readiness for the next attack. Recent events demonstrate that despite our best efforts, there are new ways to uncover our vulnerabilities in the form of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). And who knows what will emerge next? But despite all of the resources being poured into our readiness plans, fundamental holes still exist, and inexplicably, continue to be ignored both by the private and the public sectors.

Lying just a few feet beneath the pavement of all urban (and indeed suburban) areas is a complicated web of pipes, wires, cables and other conduit that transport electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, potable water, waste, and steam. In addition to the utility networks, urban areas, much rail transportation and some road traffic is underground. And in most of these areas, the easiest access to these vital infrastructure elements is our common everyday manholes, which generally lie unprotected and secured within our city and town streets.

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Imagine a situation where someone who has an IED similar to the recent case in Detroit, where a powdered substance, when making contact with combustible material, easily explodes, causing havoc and mayhem. Now apply that case to a situation where such a substance (or other similar situation such as an untraceable liquid—which is connected to our caution in allowing liquids on airplanes in these times—is thrown into one of these unprotected manholes. The ensuing explosion has the potential to not only paralyze a city (power down, communications out, waste and water frozen in place, transportation halted), but the future of that city would remain in jeopardy, causing fear and panic in all cities with similar infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Ultimately, without manhole security, cities and townships in the United States risk suffering significant consequences resulting from open and spontaneous attacks on underground infrastructure, including incalculable economic damages, large numbers of civilian casualties, considerable disruptions to urban lives, and overwhelming fear, that will not likely dissipate after the first attack.

Interestingly, there are a number of methods for securing manholes, including intrusion detection, television surveillance and hardening. None of these provide a practical barrier to prevent unauthorized access; therefore to call these methods security would be a misnomer. The first two are detection mechanisms, which, once infiltration is achieved, would be useless because in the case of these IEDs, the time between infiltration and destruction would be mere seconds. And hardening or physically sealing the covers is both expensive, inefficient, and would make the necessary regular maintenance of these spaces cumbersome and much less efficient.