Katrina, 9/11 Put Focus on Extreme Events Research

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Ten days after 9/11, University at Buffalo structural engineers were at Ground Zero investigating the collapse of the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings. Thus began a new era in anti-terrorism research at UB and other universities nationwide that responded to the call for new methods to improve homeland security.

Four years after that tragic day, UB now has more than $21 million in active federal and state grants to develop and investigate new methods for combating terrorist threats and attacks. Nationwide, the federal government has provided billions of dollars in funding for anti-terror research at universities.

"Prior to 9/11, we thought of terrorism as a series of sporadic events," says UB researcher Michel Bruneau, who recently returned from field-testing the blast resistance of bridges for the Federal Highway Administration. "Now we realize that terrorism is something that will be with us for the foreseeable future."

Bruneau, who was among the team of UB engineers at Ground Zero, is helping coordinate a campuswide effort to harness UB research expertise across a range of disciplines -- from microbiology and immunology to geographic information science, chemistry and engineering -- and apply that expertise to the development of tools and techniques to combat terrorism or, more generally, to respond to "extreme events."

Mitigation and response to extreme events is one of 10 strategic strengths, areas in which the university has potential to excel and to distinguish itself among its peers, identified in the first phase of the UB 2020 strategic planning process. By combining scholarly diversity around this common theme, and by bringing together UB research groups that have not traditionally interacted with each other, the hope is that truly unique research programs will emerge.

"The focus on extreme events takes advantage of UB's diversified portfolio of research strengths," explains Bruneau, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering who directs the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) headquartered at UB.

"By combining our existing strengths, we can expand the boundaries of what we can accomplish to help combat terrorism activities and respond to other extreme situations."

Bruneau's recent work to test the blast resistance of bridges using techniques he helped pioneer for testing the seismic resistance of bridges, is an example of how UB researchers are applying existing expertise to develop what Bruneau calls a "multi-hazard approach" to homeland security and disaster response.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the wisdom and value of a multi-hazard approach to extreme events has become painfully clear. The effect of that historic natural phenomenon, combined with an apparent lack of emergency preparedness and response, has resulted in a disaster unprecedented in U.S. history -- a disaster that some have compared to a catastrophic terrorist attack.

"The U.S. government will now have to take even more seriously the possibility that the U.S. is susceptible not just to localized disasters, but to catastrophes with national consequences," says Ernest Sternberg, professor of urban and regional planning, who has developed a new graduate-level course on disaster and domestic security planning. "The Department of Homeland Security will have to recommit to its combined mission of fighting natural and technological disasters as well as terrorism."

And just as UB engineers responded in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they are again responding to this historic tragedy -- a reconnaissance team of engineers affiliated with MCEER this week is in areas of Mississippi devastated by Katrina to determine specific causes behind the failures of large engineered structures, primarily commercial buildings. Their presence is an example of UB's multi-hazard approach to disasters, Bruneau notes. "Similar forces are at work with an earthquake, blast or hurricane," he says. "What we're looking at is, essentially, how to harden structures and infrastructure to make them more resistive to disaster or terrorist attack."

Moving forward, "facility protection" will become a niche focus of UB's research emphasis on extreme events. Obviously, protection against natural or manmade destructive forces will be emphasized, but facilities can come "under attack" by biological forces, too -- some natural, others manmade, such as SARS or anthrax, notes Iain Hay, professor of microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

"Nature is the biggest terrorist," says Hay, who is a member of the executive board of the Northeast Biodefense Center of the National Institutes of Health. "There are people (at UB) who can design sensors that can detect infectious agents in buildings and there are scientists who have developed technologies that are capable of responding to that event.

"There's an interface here between people who design structures and people who think about the dangers of being inside that structure that we clearly should be able to build on."

Adds Sternberg: "UB's strength is the technological aspect of dealing with buildings and other kinds of facilities and infrastructures, and we have excellent strength in microbiology. And they're connected because if you think about a terrorist attack on the country with biological weapons, the terrorist will do it in such a way that the stuff doesn't disperse, so they don't want to do it outdoors…they're going to target buildings.

"There's a big connection between the physical dangers to buildings and biological dangers to buildings," Sternberg says. "So to the extent that we understand how to design and engineer such spaces and make them secure and safer, it's really of great interest nationally."

Development of the Buffalo BioBlower is one tangible example of a promising -- and multidisciplinary -- UB research venture focused on facility protection. The device, invented by UB chemist James F. Garvey and engineering faculty members John Lordi, James D. Felske and Joseph C. Mollendorf, can eradicate airborne biological pathogens, such as anthrax, and can potentially kill other airborne pathogens, such as avian flu, SARS and influenza viruses. The Department of Defense, which has appropriated $3 million for commercial production of the device, is investigating the viability of BioBlower for use in government facilities and mobile facilities in the theater of war.

Within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, several research projects focused on facility protection and anti-terrorism are currently under way, according to Dean Mark H. Karwan. The Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors, for example, has received nearly $3 million from federal, state and private sources, including the Department of Defense, over the past 18 months. Among its activities, the center is developing a method of combining multiple biometric technologies, focused on multiple physical and behavioral characteristics of people, to identify individuals entering the U.S.

"No one thinks anti-terrorism is an application area for basic and applied research that will ever go away," says Karwan. "It is very ripe for multidisciplinary work -- such as the development of biosensors -- and we have a good group of folks who work well together and who can apply their expertise to critical issues of the day."

Other examples of current anti-terrorism and extreme-event initiatives currently under way at UB include:

• Development of a handheld biosensor, funded by the National Science Foundation, to detect the presence of toxins used in biological warfare.

• A $2.5 million grant project from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to UB's Center for MultiSource Information Fusion to improve how decision-makers respond in the minutes and hours that follow a natural disaster or a manmade incident.

• A Transportation Security Administration-funded study of airport security systems and how security personnel use them. The project's goal is to determine the best combination of human training and technology to reduce screening errors.

• A Federal Aviation Administration-funded project to develop a new anti-terrorism search engine designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites. The system is part of an effort to anticipate -- and thwart -- the plans of potential terrorists.

• Development of a cyberterrorism-detection software system that can provide a high-grade layer of protection for military facilities and government agencies, as well as banking and other commercial networks that require tight cyber-monitoring.

• Creation of a Western New York Population Health Observatory to establish a bioterrorism and public-health surveillance system to monitor unusual patterns of illness.

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