Pentagon developing system to protect buildings from bio, chem attacks

A protective system being developed by the Defense Department could soon render it pointless for terrorists to attack U.S. buildings with biological or chemical agents, the lead official in the effort told Global Security Newswire last week.

Researchers are developing a ventilation-based system to protect Defense Department buildings that is also intended for widespread use outside the military, Immune Building Program Manager Wayne Bryden wrote in an e-mail to GSN.

"The DARPA Immune Building Program has developed the machinery and the industrial base to provide protection against C/B attack for all buildings in the nation. When Immune Building technology is widely implemented, this attack option will effectively be removed from the arsenal of our enemies," wrote Bryden, whose program is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Special Projects Office.

Following the Homeland Security Department's decision early this month to raise the color-coded threat level for financial institutions around Washington and New York, police in the two cities stressed the need for effective ventilation-based biological and chemical protection.

Speaking Wednesday in New York about security for next week's Republican National Convention, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge took up the same theme, citing a preconvention effort to "increase security at hotels to protect both the building and the ventilation systems."

Biodefense Research Group Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Preston McGee, whose firm is marketing a ventilation-based defense system developed at Johns Hopkins University, said the need for new technology to counter the threat is clear.

"Being in the industry, being in the business, I know that there's not a whole lot out there," McGee said in a recent interview.

In a bid to address such concerns, Bryden's researchers are piecing together new detection, filtration, neutralization and decontamination technologies in a program that began in 2001 and is slated for a demonstration in early 2006. Battelle Building Protection Director Michael Janus, whose firm was awarded a $20 million contract this year to manage the final two years of the Immune Building Program, said in a recent interview that a "near-optimal solution" is in place and researchers are now working to "finalize the optimization process."

The researchers are seeking to give the Pentagon tools to make military facilities virtually invulnerable to biological and chemical attacks - thereby making savvy attackers unlikely to use such methods, according to Bryden. The results of the program, though, would not remain within the Defense Department, Bryden wrote.

"The government has paid commercial firms to develop the underlying technologies and systems solutions for the IB Program, so the capability to produce these systems already resides within the commercial sector. We have also worked to keep interested parties aware of the outstanding progress of the program," he wrote. "We have every expectation that the industrial base, seeded by the Immune Building activities, will be able to effectively protect a wide range of buildings from chemical and biological threats, no matter how they are delivered."

Leading up to a final demonstration at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., in less than two years, the Immune Building design is now being honed at a test site in Anniston, Ala. A single, multilayered protection system installed in an existing building at the Missouri facility would also serve to demonstrate a "building protection tool kit" that civilian and military building managers can tailor to their own risk analyses, cost constraints and structural requirements.

"You can think about it being almost like a menu of options that, if you have a very high threat level, you may use a significant portion of the menu," Janus said.

"Regardless of what threat you're talking about, each building owner is always going to conduct a risk analysis," he said. "The purpose of this program was to show that a lot of these state-of-the-art technologies could be put together to provide you with a very high level of protection, while at the same time looking at less-than-optimal systems."

The system involves advanced sensors and filtration and neutralization technologies, and the demonstration will also include decontamination and forensic-evidence collection, according to Bryden. He added that the system would incorporate both "passive" catchall defenses that would operate at all times and "active," sensor-based protection that would react to the presence of a pathogen.

"Modeling, analysis and extensive experiments conducted in the Immune Building Program," he said, "have determined that the most effective and lowest-cost solution to protect a building from chemical and biological attack is a mixture of passive and active technologies. While passive-only approaches provide significant levels of protection, they are less cost-effective."

The degree to which civilian buildings that may be at risk have already installed ventilation-based defenses remains unclear. Some critics have called attention to what they see as an alarming dearth of such defenses around the country.

"The majority of the HVAC [heating, ventilation and air-conditioning] community is ill-prepared to deal with a real biological or chemical accident," McGee said. "They don't want to talk, because most of them do not have a fail-proof methodology of protecting the building. It's just not there. That was the cause for DARPA to come up with the Immune Building Program."

"The terrorists, unfortunately, are just as smart or smarter than they are," he added. "The available solutions are out there for people to buy, and the companies that have solutions are selling it, [so] the terrorists know what's out there - and there's not a whole lot out there."

Janus said building owners have been "pretty responsible at looking at this problem" but that it is too early to expect widespread installations of the latest technology. Five to 10 years ago, he said, "This type of problem would not even hit the radar screen. … Now it's starting to make the Top 10 list of concerns."