"Explosions... in a second they maim destroy and kill." "Scientists test explosives to see how they work and to figure out how to contain them." "They urgently seek new ways to protect people, to save innocent lives." "First you have to understand what an explosion does." "To begin with, it's a chemical reaction, and that sets off a violent release of energy, a blast." "The blast produces a shock wave that hurtles outwards." "It's this shock wave that does dreadful damage to people by crushing their internal organs." "Then flying debris adds to the mutilation." "In the 1980's and '90's, Americans became targets for terrorist bombs." "It began in 1983 in Beirut." "First, the U.S. Embassy was flattened by a bomb, killing 63." "Next, a truck laden with explosives killed 241 US soldiers." "Then the menace attacked Americans at home." "The Atlanta Olympics the World Trade Center" "Oklahoma City." "Events and places with no obvious connection, now, all are linked by bombs violent death, and terror." "An explosion in the sky is a particularly terrifying prospect." "Increased security has prevented many terrorist attempts but airplanes are still vulnerable." "There are a lot of places to hide a bomb, like the luggage containers." "In 1988, the terrible tragedy of PanAm flight 103 spurred scientific research to solve this problem." "Flames licked the night's sky as an entire row of houses was engulfed by the searing fireball, which roared through this area of Lockerbie." "A large lump of the plane carved this crater forty feet deep atomizing the single story houses that had stood there." "The fuselage fragmented at the force of the explosion." "One man narrowly escaped but watched his house burn down." "There was this almighty bang, my son and I were in the house so I said, "Get down!"" "And the whole sky lit up and I realized it was a plane." "But there was debris falling everywhere and I thought the whole roof was going to cave in on us at the time but I looked out the back window and all I could see was fires." "The blast over Lockerbie was so violent and sudden, the crew didn't even have time to make an emergency call." "At 31,000 feet, the passengers and crew of Flight 103 had no chance." "270 people died." "The explosion blew the airplane into a million pieces, killing everyone on board and eleven residents of the quiet country town." "Painstaking detective work slowly built up a picture of what happened." "Allegedly a suitcase was loaded into a Pan Am luggage container at Frankfurt, Germany." "The container was transferred on to the New York bound 747 at London's Heathrow." "Inside the case was a portable sound system." "Inside that was a pound of Semtex high explosive." "The investigators will be first of all producing an accurate plot of exactly where all the wreckage is located, from this they can tell a great deal about what has happened." "They'll be looking at the bodies." "They were doing x-rays to see if they can detect the tell-tale shrapnel effect of the bomb." "The team found over 90 percent of the shattered aircraft." "Around the forward cargo hold the reassembled fuselage revealed the classic signs of explosive petalling." "This confirmed that flight 103 was brought down by a bomb in the luggage compartment." "The black box recorded that at precisely 19.02 and 50 seconds, an explosion destroyed all the data links in the plane." "In a single second, the bomb tore the cockpit clean away from the rest of the plane." "Could any way be found to prevent such catastrophic destruction?" "As soon as it became clear that Flight 103 had been destroyed by a bomb, scientists began testing ways of making airplanes safer." "The first tests reproduced the last tragic seconds of Flight 103." "Because an aircraft is pressurized, even a small bomb can cause not one but two explosions." "The first, punches a hole in the side." "The second, an explosive decompression, rips the plane apart." "The only way to stop this second explosion is to stop the first blast from rupturing the aircraft skin." "In this test, a blast protection wall was fitted inside the fuselage." "A bomb was placed next to it." "The test was fiilmed from outside the plane." "The result was dramatic." "The aircraft skin rippled but did not break" "Encouraged by this result the scientists took a full sized wide-bodied jet and put four bombs in it." "Three along the forward section behind the hardened liner and one in the unprotected tail." "In the protected section only the windows burst." "For passengers this would cause discomfort and they'd have to use oxygen masks, but they'd survive." "In the protected section, with the fuselage skin intact, there'd be no second explosion." "The test proved that lining the body of an airplane would save lives, but the special lining adds weight and costs money." "Maybe it would be more feasible to make individual luggage containers bomb-proof." "The first thing scientists had to test was the effect of a Lockerbie-sized bomb on a normal luggage container." "About the same amount of Semtex that caused the Lockerbie blast is primed and placed in a suitcase ready for the first controlled test." "This aluminum container is the standard type used on all wide-body jets." "For the second test, a container made from a new composite material is subjected to the same strength blast." "Plywood mock-ups sit on either side to simulate a packed hold." "The difference between the old and new containers could quite literally be the difference between life and death." "The new containers are heavier and more expensive than the aluminum ones, but the tests prove they could withstand a Lockerbie-sized bomb." "Now it's up to the airlines to decide whether to use them." "Today, Americans at home are more at risk than ever before from terrorist bombs." "Here at New Mexico Tech, they believe that to know your enemy you must first understand his weapons." "This used to be a purely military test site." "Now they've added home-made bombs to their arsenal." "One scientist has been testing explosives here for 25 years." "He knows more than most about terrorist bombing campaigns." "Test Site Director, Van Romero." "Over a number of years there's been lots of bombings going on in the United States, but we really haven't in the past perceived them as a national threat." "On the average there are 3,000 bombings that take place in the United States but they have been more aimed at individuals rather than a group of people." "We did have a bomb go off I don't know exactly where, it's inside the building on the north side of I street here." "One dead?" "So far we seem to have one confirmed dead." "In the U.S., the most infamous serial bombing campaign took place between 1978 and 1996." "Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, was responsible for 16 bombs in his solitary campaign against what he saw as the evils of technology." "Over 18 years, his small home-made devices killed 3 and maimed a further 23." "He was fiinally caught when his own brother became suspicious and contacted the F.B.I." "Ted, do you have anything to say?" "Ted are you the Unabomber?" "After the capture, Koczynski's victims spoke of their relief." "I'D just like to know that you know that, this case can be closed, you know, just so that there aren't any further people whose lives are affected and torn apart by this." "The Unabomber's weapon of choice was the letter bomb." "It's small, it's hard to detect it's deadly." "At New Mexico Tech the experts learn what happens when a home-made letter bomb goes off." "This mailbox contains a letter bomb." "It only takes a detonator the size of a pencil to cause this much damage." "But in real life this explosion takes place in somebody's hands." "This is a typical letter bomb, okay, you see here that this person was seated at the, seated at this desk, they had a letter that was on the table and they went to open it up and it detonated." "So a letter bomb here caused actually a minimal amount of damage blew a square hole in the desk probably had some injuries to these hands that you see here." "The person will probably survive hopefully, maybe taken some shrapnel to the torso." "Now we go into the other room where we exploded a package bomb, probably about twice as much as was in the letter bomb, you see a significantly a lot more damage, okay." "Dry wall has fallen off the top of the roof, this window has been blown out, glass has been shattered all over the doors have been blown off some of the hinges and a lot of damage, certainly a lot of damage to the person" "who is involved with opening up the package, probably a fatality has occurred in, at this location." "Letter and package bombs are hard to detect." "But nowadays x-ray scanners in many mail rooms can reveal the tell-tale shape of the battery, wire and detonator." "When the machine spots a bomb staff call in the specialists." "This happened in New York when workers at the UN were on the receiving end of a series of letter bombs." "They have detected another letter." "This is now in the third basement of the building where the mail that comes into the building is initially processed." "Once a letter bomb is discovered, the next problem is how to get rid of it safely." "In Britain, scientists are testing new ways of dealing with letter and package bombs." "At the British Army firing range on Salisbury Plain, a blast proof container is being tried out." "If it works it'll be used to smother letter bombs." "Having detected it with your mail scanner, the sensible thing is to put it in the unit, isolate it and let bomb disposal deal with it later." "We have to contain the effects of an explosion, being the shock wave and then the product gases of which there's a lot more in this size of device and the fragmentation and this unit for isolating such mail has proved to be" "very effective at that in independent trials." "In the test, a replica of the largest package bomb ever sent is exploded inside the new container." "The secret is in the lining." "It's made of Tabre, a special composite of rock and resin, riddled with thousands of tiny passageways." "The shock wave from the blast is forced down and around the passageways losing energy as it goes." "The Tabre material is very good at absorbing the shock wave, it acts a bit like a a stone sponge, and the shock wave enters the material and then starts doing work on that material, wearing itself out." "A curly wire mesh absorbs the heat generated by the gas in the blast." "If the package bomb is large enough the case itself will buckle under the pressure," "safely removing the last deadly energy from the explosion." "This in physical terms means that with a device that potentially could kill you, the pressure is now reduced to below the level that would start to give you ear damage, so you're actually very safe." "The staff in corporate and embassy mail rooms around the world will benefit from these tests and the bomber will have one less weapon with which to Maim and kill." "But sometimes terrorists are set on making a bigger impression, a huge, devastating blast intended to cause massive loss of life." "On the morning of April 19th, 1995, parents were dropping their children off at the child-care center in Oklahoma City's Federal Building." "In an instant, a truck bomb demolished the structure." "When the smoke cleared 168 people were dead." "Americans woke up to the worst terrorist attack ever on home soil." "The United States will not tolerate it and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards." "Bomber Timothy Mc Veigh used 100 sacks of explosive to wreak this havoc." "The main ingredient in the bomb was a common agricultural fertilizer called ammonium nitrate." "Until terrorists started using it, no-one had really looked into the explosive effects of this day-to-day product." "Now, at New Mexico Tech, scientists routinely explode fertilizer to see what it does and how." "The scenario is that someone's put about five hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate in the back of this van, pulled up next to a building, and the ammonium nitrate will be detonated." "This is a typical bag, this is actually blasting ammonium nitrate, that you see here, we've opened it up, these are the pearls of ammonium nitrate that are coated with fuel oil, this is actually very insensitive." "You can pound on it, and you can drive around in the back of a car and nothing's going to happen to it, but what you have to do is actually get some other explosives, what we call a booster," "that will boost this up and actually cause it to detonate." "The problem is that what makes ammonium nitrate such a good fertilizer, is exactly what makes it a good explosive." "The bad guys can get, you can go down the local feed store, buy the ammonium nitrate fertilizer that you could put on your lawn, and then they take that and they they doctor it up with other things that" "that turn it into an explosive." "This type of bomb tends to be set off in cities, so the truck in this test is surrounded with buildings and walls." "Scientists want to know what the bomb will do to structures around it and where the shrapnel will fly." "From a quarter of a mile away inside a reinforced concrete bomb shelter," "Van and his team detonate the truck bomb." "Okay ready for countdown." "Countdown five, four three, two, one." "We saw 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate detonated in the back of a van." "And this is some sheet metal from that van and we are probably a few 100 yards away from where the detonation occurred and the ground is littered with these types of pieces of metal." "It's not just the shock wave but it's the shrapnel that comes out of the explosion as well that causes a lot of damage." "The truck has disintegrated." "It would be hard to tell anything about where it came from." "The building is reduced to rubble." "But on closer inspection the blast has left a fiingerprint." "If you know what to look for the signs are there." "There's residue left on this piece of particle board, you can see little specks all over." "And a chemist can come in and collect this residue and take it back to the lab and look at what the molecular compounds are that make up that residue and from those molecular compounds we can tell what kind of explosive." "Was it ammonium nitrate was it C4, was it TNT?" "So just fiinding out the type of explosive is a very important first clue." "The way the shrapnel flies tells scientists a lot about the size and type of bomb." "This kind of test directly helps investigators track down terrorists." "These types of events that we're simulating here, are really attacks on thousands of people and it really has come home to our nation that this is a threat that's really is here now with us and that we have to deal with it" "and so we're trying to take corrective actions." "Some people say the kind of fertilizer used by bombers like Mc Veigh should no longer be sold, even though it's important to farming all over the country." "Others have argued that the fertilizer could be made safer by adding special chemicals to it." "After Oklahoma City, investigators from a company called Exponent set up an experiment to fiind out whether this was possible." "We were initially retained to counter a lawsuit alleging that ammonium nitrate manufactures could have made this product safer by putting in an additive which prevented this material from detonating." "There were two potential additives that the plaintiff's lawyer claimed could make fertilizer safer." "So Ali designed a test program." "For the first test, the control," "Ali puts a detonator into an inert substance that would not explode kitty litter." "When the detonator goes off the whole thing just turns into a messy dust cloud." "Next, the fertilizer is measured out and doctored just the way a terrorist bomb would be." "Ali prepares three samples." "One is the straight fertilizer, the second is fertilizer with a potential blast suppresser additive, called mono ammonium-phosphate." "The third has a different suppressor di-ammonium phosphate." "The three mixes are detonated, so that the blasts with and without additives can be exactly measured." "The objective of these tests was to determine if this additive worked if at all." "We set off 75 pound charges." "We also set up witness plates which are basically glass windows, which get shattered as the pressure pulse hits it to understand how the damage is being propagated." "And of course the further away a window broke the more destructive a specific explosive was." "The fact of the matter is that ammonium nitrate with mono ammonium phosphate, which is the first additive explodes very nicely." "Ammonium nitrate with di-ammonium phosphate which is the second additive explodes very nicely." "The result surprises even Ali." "The test results were surprising because we had expected some effect from the additive." "There is no effect." "Once it goes, it goes off with as much violence as the straight ammonium nitrate." "In this case the additive makes no difference what so ever." "The tests proved that there was nothing the manufacturers could have done to stop their product from being used to make bombs." "In London, England in 1993, a massive fertilizer bomb was detonated by the IRA." "It was a graphic reminder that in cities there is more to deal with than just the blast." "The bomb turned the whole area into a war zone of flying glass." "With cameras actually rolling as the blast shook the area, debris and shattered glass can be seen falling into the street from the offices around the bomb." "Windows in office buildings up to a third of a mile away were blown out." "He was covered in blood from top to bottom, you know, and we, I got him half way down here with another guy then I went back in and got the other bloke out then." "The London bomb showed that in downtown areas, the worst danger in an explosion is from flying glass." "Blown out of thousands of windows when they shatter." "Devising tests to help make blast proof glass has become a high priority." "At the 3M Corporation they called on specialist David Cox." "The effect of a blast wave is that its going to pick on the weakest parts and when you get a blast wave you have this really powerful positive pressure, which pushes in against the structure of the building and of course the glass" "is the weakest point and that's that's what gives." "And then you have immediately afterwards this negative suction part of the, the blast wave, which sucks the shattered glass out." "So you can get a third of the glass blown into a building and probably two thirds of the glass sucked out, which is why you see so much glass lying on the streets afterwards." "This is exactly what happened to such deadly effect when the London bomb went off." "The streets were piled with glass sucked back towards the blast." "So the challenge was to develop a way to reduce or eliminate the effect of a blast on window glass." "3M went to New Mexico to test their ideas." "The main test involved detonating a bomb a thousand feet away from different sheets of glass." "First up, toughened glass." "It takes a strong blast but still breaks into deadly flying shards." "Next, sheets of glass with a layered polyester fiilm stuck to them." "These tolerate enormous increases and decreases in pressure, holding the glass together." "It works, but there's a new problem." "The laminates are so good that the entire window is blown from the frame." "Developments are being made to improve the strength of the fillm and to improve the way that it's installed using a structural silicone to bond it into the frame, and that allows the whole pane to remain exactly where it is." "This silicone and fiilm combination has proved to be the answer to everyone's problems." "The corporations they will see that they can actually go back to work within a day or so, because they haven't got damage to the building, the people and the clear up costs are so much reduced and they can" "just carry on and that saves millions and millions of dollars." "If windows are coated and bonded, a bomber's victims will be much less at risk from flying glass." "Thanks to the successful tests, many new urban downtown buildings are now using blast proof glass." "Terrorist bombs remain an unpredictable threat, but every day we use ordinary fuels that can also cause deadly explosions." "In 1984 at Edwards Air Force Base a test on a new fire suppressant went spectacularly wrong." "A remotely flown Boeing 720 filled with test fuel and test dummies, was meant to belly land and skid gracefully to a halt with any fuel fires suppressed by the new additive." "But the pilot lost control and the fuel test became an explosive disaster." "Fuels in the form of liquid gas are transported by air sea, rail and road everyday." "Their explosive potential threatens all of us." "Some of the worst accidents have involved a deadly explosive that many people have in their homes, whether for barbecues, camping heating, or kitchen stoves, propane gas canisters can be lethal in a fire." "In 1978, a young Spanish boy witnessed a horrific series of simultaneous propane gas explosions." "The accident happened, on a hot summer day, at a holiday camp south of Barcelona." "The nine-year-old boy had been invited to have lunch with a friend, and his mother had sent the boys to go pick up some desserts." "Running that errand saved this boy's life." "I was invited by a friend of mine, who was also about nine or ten years old to have lunch at his place." "So as we were lunching you know," "I remembered my mother had told me to go to pick up some desserts, you know, ice cream." "I was looking into a fridge for the ice cream and then I walked out of the restaurant and then was the moment when the accident happened." "His mother and his sister were there and they died, you know, and the two of us were looking into, into that big curtain of smoke." "What young Mario and his friend saw almost defies belief." "A road tanker, overloaded with gas, had exploded and burst into flames right outside the campsite." "The coastal breeze swept the fire through tents and trailers while vacationers were taking their afternoon siesta." "The heat of the fireball set off a chain of further explosions as campers' portable gas cylinders blew up one by one." "The death toll approached two hundred." "The tanker had been filled beyond its safety limits and the heat of the sun had made the gas explode." "In a tragic coincidence it was going right past the campsite at the time." "We are now standing in front of the memorial of the accident." "As you can see many stars which remind us of people who lost their lives here that summer." "Tanker truck designs and regulations have changed since this tragedy, but propane gas containers are still in daily use all over the world." "Propane is even said to become the car fuel of the future." "If this is going to happen someone has to come up with gas containers that won't explode." "In Holland a new design is being tested." "Its inventors claim it will never explode in a fire." "It's a rubber container lined with carbon fibre, similar to a bulletproof vest." "The first test is designed to fiind the tank's failure point." "Because the gas becomes a liquid under pressure, water can take its place in this test." "So they keep pumping water in until the structure gives way." "The container only bursts at well over twice the maximum pressure it would ever encounter in everyday use." "The burst reveals the black fibers that give it its strength." "The second stress test is the one aimed to please car manufacturers." "They have to know that a car run on propane gas will not explode in a crash." "So the container is smashed at forty miles per hour into a razor sharp block of steel." "It doesn't rupture." "The carbon fiber and rubber combination is safe in a crash." "The ultimate stress test is to see what happens when you set fire to the new carbon fiber container." "As the container heats up the unique properties of the carbon fiber come into play." "It starts to expand and melt." "The gas leaks out, harmlessly." "It burns off, but there are no violent flames and no explosion." "As the campsite tragedy showed, when fire brakes out the traditional steel gas containers will either explode or become flame-throwers." "It looks as though this smart use of new materials could point the way to a safer future." "The disaster Mario witnessed as a boy, will never be forgotten." "But he wishes that tests to fiind safer gas containers could have happened earlier." "That's a very sad thing you know, that sometimes accidents have to take place and then there is a reaction and measures are taken, it would be nice, you know, if it was the other way around." "Explosions kill because there's no time to escape." "In 1988, in the worst offshore oil rig accident in history, a 167 people died for just that reason." "I was on the twenty-foot level and there was a massive explosion and great balls of flame." "So I jumped into the sea because the rescue boat moved away otherwise I would have been burned with all the people." "The icy sea off the Scottish coast was the only sanctuary because the flames on the Piper Alpha platform exploded out of control." "It started with a gas leak that exploded into a fireball." "It quickly heated up neighbouring gas and oil pipelines." "After that, the nightmare grew explosion by explosion." "In the chaos, many men ran through the maze of pipes looking for a way to escape." "Bob Ballantyne decided to confront the inferno on deck." "I was shouting and I couldn't hear myself shouting," "I was shouting back at the noise that I was going to be saved." "And it was so scary, so much so, that about half the lads who had came out with us went back into the accommodation." "They never survived, they died in their accommodation." "Heat from the four hundred foot flames could be felt a mile away." "For hours rescuers couldn't get close to the rig." "At first light the beat of helicopters were still bringing in the injured." "The ordeal of the disaster had completely numbed them." "Some of the patients though were well enough to be able to talk about their experiences on the platform." "The decision was made for me it was roasting, you know, it was fry or jump so it was jump." "The Piper Alpha disaster led the oil and gas industries to completely overhaul offshore safety." "British Gas took the problem to their test site in the North of England." "The idea was to recreate the extreme pressures, temperatures and forces that turn a small explosion into a major catastrophe." "Because the site is so remote," "British Gas can set off full-scale explosions and fire tests." "A series of detailed stress tests have been undertaken on pipes and tanks, with the aim of redesigning the rigs so they save lives." "The test that we are going to see here today is a full-scale high-pressure natural gas jet fire." "We undertake tests like this to understand the nature of the fire we may be for example want to know what sort of size it is going to be, what the surrounding heat about the fire is going to be." "We're going to be using somewhere in the region of thirty kilograms a second or so in natural gas which is obviously quite a large amount of gas." "Five, four, three, two, one." "Gas on an offshore rig is under extreme pressure, and will sometimes escape." "If the pressurized gas catches fire it turns into a jet of flame blasting at almost five hundred feet per second." "This is what happened on Piper Alpha and the incident got out of hand." "The fire burned through further pipe work causing yet more explosions." "So one of the first steps in improving safety is to fireproof the pipes." "They devised a way of testing this fire proofiing, in a scaled down, high-pressure flame test." "A pipe coated in a new fireproof cement is positioned just inches from a high-pressure gas jet." "This is a model of part of an offshore gas platform at one-tenth the actual size." "Even scaled down, the test will generate so much heat that the building it's in must be cooled by running water or the steel structure will buckle." "The test can run for up to two hours, which is about the sort of time that you would need to be able to evacuate an installation." "When Piper Alpha went up the crew only had 20 minutes between the initial explosion and the secondary blasts." "Two hours would have made all the difference." "It basically is providing protection to stop major components failing to allow them the time to, to be able to either isolate, to remove the gas source itself or to provide time to escape." "After the flame test the coating does show some wear from the force of the flame, but the pipeline itself would have held up." "The next test is aimed at reducing the effects of big explosions." "This test has to be as close to real-life conditions as possible, so British Gas has built the top section of a full size oil rig, complete with pipe work and gas tanks." "What we're doing in it is studying explosions that you might have if you had an accidental gas release on an offshore installation." "We covered the areas that are not covered by the steel walls with polythene and then we can fill the module with a gas air mixture" "and then we can ignite it and measure the explosion that goes on inside there." "First of all, we would install a whole range of instrumentation to measure how the explosion flame develops." "Obviously you need high-speed cine cameras and high-speed data logging systems for events that only last a few milliseconds." "The full-scale tests pay off in an unexpected way." "Most rigs are fitted with powerful water sprinklers." "When a fire breaks out, the spray comes on and drenches the rig." "In this test, scientists turn on the sprinklers early, after an initial gas escape but crucially, before it has time to explode." "If the deluge system is operating and then the gas cloud did ignite the pressure that would be generated if the deluge was operating would be significantly less and much less damaging." "The water spray doesn't stop the explosion but it slows down the shock wave." "All the water from the sprinklers absorbs the force from the blast." "Result, the explosion is less destructive." "And that might mean that the structure could survive the explosion instead of being significantly damaged or even collapsing." "On a rig in the middle of the sea, the longer a structure holds together the more time there is to escape." "Today they say the sprinklers should be set off at the first sign of gas, before it has time to explode." "A billion dollars and a 167 lives later, the rule book has been re written and offshore rigs are many times safer." "For Bob Ballantyne they will never be safe enough." "That night, as he lay in the water watching his friends die in an inferno above him, he made the decision never to go off shore again." "When we were growing up as children we were told that the worst place to go was hell and for me the Piper Alpha was hell." "Explosive materials are a terrifying force." "The more we test them, the better we understand them." "We will never do away with risk altogether, but with the help of scientists, we can try to stay one step ahead of the dangers we face every day."