Safety and protection of built infrastructure to resist integral threats

Terrorist attacks by bombing (E) or Chemical, Biological or Radiological (CBR)-agents are threats with a low probability but with disastrous consequences. There is strong need to protect people, the societal community and critical infrastructures and utilities against being damaged, destroyed or disrupted by deliberate acts of terrorism. Solutions have to be derived to realize sufficient resilience of the urban infrastructure for rare occasions with minimum effect on normality. Hitherto, normal regulations and building guidelines do not take into account the CBRE threat. Within the 7th framework of the EU, the SPIRIT consortium was formed to bring the required expertise together, to make these commonly available and to find solutions that can be integrated into normal life and planning and building procedures. Within SPIRIT a terrorist attack within the scope of CBRE-threat is addressed. The anticipated main outcome of the project is an integrated approach to counter CBRE-threats, including proposed guidelines for an EU Regulatory Framework. With this approach, government, end users of buildings and designers can define and achieve a desired level of protection. The overall goal of the SPIRIT project is to contribute to people safety and increase the resilience of built infrastructure against a terrorist threat. A methodology to quantify the consequences of an attack and the effectiveness of countermeasures as well as a suit of protective products are SPIRIT’s foreseen deliverables. The SPIRIT project is a three year project and has started in August 2010. In this paper we present an overview of the project as well as some first results, concerning scenario selection, the vulnerability assessment approach anticipated and the software tool that is supposed to guide this vulnerability assessment.