Water and Sand Provide Protection From Car Bombs

In some parts of the world, car bombs are a very real threat on a day to day basis. Iraq’s Green Zone is a notorious current model for the horror of the practice. Israel is another hot zone for bombings. Border crossing has been a dangerous ordeal there for a long time. When we mention car bombings, many still recall the Oklahoma bombing of the Murrow Federal Building. We recognize while trying not to admit it, that we are all exposed to some degree. Even in the Green Zone the target of the attacks are American Citizens. Yes, car bombings do affect us both directly and indirectly.

Check points are obviously among the most dangerous places to work. Soldiers who man these stations are at high risk pretty much all the time. Part of the trouble is in not having adequate blast containment strategies in place. You might think it takes a lot of on site engineering, concrete, steel, and money to build a blast wall, and that for this reason the personnel have to accept exposure as a calculated risk and part of their duty. Is such really the case though?

In Britian they have been testing plastic kiddy pool technology with at twist and aiming that at blast containment. The twist is that instead of putting water on the outside and air on the inside, they pump these plastic tubular structures full of water intending to direct checkpoint traffic between them. If a bomb goes off, the water walls direct much of the energy upward, and what remains simply tears the bulkheads apart and showers down a light rain of hot water.

http://nl.truveo.com/Military-Car-Bomb-Protection-Plan-In-Place/id/220341581 

While the concept is novel, it seems to suffer from the reality that most of the areas that are really hot with this type of violence are also hot in the desert where water is not so easy to come by. Even so, you have to admit that stopping a massive bomb blast with a big plastic bag full of water is a pretty cool, though flimsy, approach.

There is a company in America (www.bigblok.com) that has come up with a better solution. Using giant Lego like capsules made of polyethylene (Tupperware), walls can be built to any height or thickness by stagger stacking these interlocking container modules one on top of the other. These can be filled with water or with sand to absorb a massive shock wave. Obviously, water will create no shrapnel hazard, and even sand will do little more than give you a bad rash. Filling these containers with gravel though would be a bad decision.

The best thing about these “Building Blocks” is that these containers are food grade too. You can ship yogurt in them. They are also approved fuel transporting containers. But they will also contain low grade nuclear waste, or human waste, or medical waste. These things are about twelve inches high, and there is even a toilet seat accessory that replaces the lid until the thing gets full. Then you screw the self sealing lid back on and put the toilet seat on top of an empty.

Imagine sending supplies of all sorts into a zone of instability, using these containers for building blocks without even unpacking them if the case requires such, emptying them as needed, replacing them into the wall structure full of sand or waste, and then shipping them back out again empty or full. Color coded, and sized to be handled by a couple of men, these capsules are very multi-purpose.

We would like to see less violence and fewer bombings rather than more ingenuity toward containment, but necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity of defensive engineering continues to yield new things. The plastic bags look fun, but I’d put my money on www.bigblok.com .