SPIRIT · Safety and Protection of built Infrastructure to Resist Integral Threats

Terrorist attacks by bombing or 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. Fortunately, the required specialist knowledge is available on explosion dynamics, response of structures, dispersions of toxic agents and the injuries. This knowledge should be explored to derive the required solutions. Therefore, the SPIRIT Consortium was formed to bring the required expertise together, 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 with the whole scope of CBRE-threat is addressed. The main outcome of the project is an integrated approach to counter CBRE-threats, including proposed guidelines for a EU Regulatory Framework. With this approach, government, end users of buildings and designers can define and achieve a desired level of protection. The SPIRIT contribution to built infrastructure protection will be: - A methodology to quantify the vulnerability of built infra in damage, number of injuries and loss of functionality and services; - A guidance tool to assess the vulnerability and define efficient and effective countermeasures to achieve a required protection level; - Draft guidelines to enable safety based engineering and the incorporation of CBRE protection; - A suite of ready to use CBRE countermeasure products. The overall goal of the SPIRIT project is to contribute to people safety and increase the resilience of built infrastructure against a terrorist attack.