RESILIENCE TACTICS

S&T conducts research to find answers to homeland security challenges.

We conducted a weeklong airflow study in the New York City subway system to understand the behavior of airborne contaminants. Officials oversaw controlled releases at Grand Central, Times Square, and Penn Station subway platforms. This is the largest airflow study of its kind to date, which involved collecting 7,000 surface and 3,000 air samples. Knowing how smoke, chemicals or fuels move through a subway system helps researchers develop practical solutions responders can use in an airflow-related incident. It also can inform new possibilities for chemical and biological contaminant detection systems.

S&T also opened a new Center of Excellence (COE) in 2016, the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI). CIRI is one of S&T’s 11 COEs, and received a five-year, up to $20 million grant to facilitate private-public partnerships that will help protect critical infrastructure systems. The new COE will explore important topics, such as how software and hardware security vulnerabilities could be exploited to mount cyberattacks, how to best measure infrastructure cyber risks, how to design affordable cyber-insurance, and how individual systems, such as ports, could be assessed to support risk reduction measures.

In 2016, a warning technology funded by S&T, Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), alerted citizens of the armed suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was responsible for a series of bombings and attempted bombings that took place in New York City and New Jersey. The geo-targeted message was brief and reached people in New York City and the vicinity, instructing them to call 911 if they saw the suspect.

To prepare for natural disasters, S&T and the Federal Emergency Management Agency recently introduced HURREVAC-extended (HVX), a web-based, storm tracking and decision-making support system. With this technology, S&T can help more emergency managers receive training with an integrated real-time, decision support tool, helping communities save the costs of unnecessary “over” evacuations and save lives by preventing “under” evacuations.

We are also leveraging the Internet of Things to mitigate the damage caused by disasters. S&T has funded prototypes of deployable, low-cost flood inundation sensors that are currently installed at the Lower Colorado River Authority, where they are being integrated with S&T’s Smart Alert Engine project as part of the Flood Apex Program. These sensors help alert, warn and notify responders and citizens of rising waters and flood conditions, which helps them avoid dangerous areas and better focus response efforts.

That’s why S&T developed technology to reduce the possible impacts of solar storms, which can damage the electric grid if directed at the Earth.

To mitigate these impacts, S&T has developed the Online Geoelectric Field Calculation Tool, which will help electric utilities better understand localized currents and prepare for solar storm events, thereby preventing power grid outages and damage to critical grid components.

S&T has also looked at technologies that could provide precision timing if GPS signals are weak or disrupted, like Enhanced Loran (eLoran). GPS’s space-based signals are low power and susceptible to possible disruptions. GPS signals also are difficult to receive indoors and in urban canyons.

Although eLoran is an older technology, S&T tested it at the New York Stock Exchange in 2016 to demonstrate how it could be used for precise and synchronized timing of financial transactions that is critical to markets worldwide, mandated by regulation in the European Union, and increasingly required in the United States. Back to Top