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| Thomas O’Rourke (left) uses an earthquake simulator to test gas pipeline performance. His research is aimed at making underground utilities more resistant to damage from both natural and man-made disasters. |
London has responded effectively to the disruption of services following terrorist bombings July 7, but the event underscores the need for a careful examination of the vulnerabilities of the underground infrastructure of our cities, says a Cornell University -engineer.
“I was impressed. The London Stock Exchange never stopped. The way they’ve cordoned off areas, the business continuity was very good. For such a potentially disruptive event, they have done very well in recovering and restoring services,” said Thomas O’Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Engineering.
O’Rourke, whose research is aimed at making underground utilities more resistant to damage—whether from man-made or natural disasters—had just returned from London, where he was the featured speaker at a June meeting convened by the Bank of England to discuss financial sector resilience in the face of disasters. Until recently, O’Rourke said, financial institutions had worried mainly about cybersecurity, but after the World Trade Center attack, they became interested in the external infrastructure networks that support their cyber infrastructure.
In his London talk, O’Rourke described the lessons of 9/11, based on his own research at the site. Communications in New York City were widely disrupted, largely because of damage to the underground infrastructure near the collapsed towers. Broken water mains poured 35,000 gallons of water per minute into a seven-story underground space, filling it “like a big bathtub” and flooding transportation tunnels all the way to New Jersey. Falling debris smashed into a vault beside the Verizon building just north of the Twin Towers, cutting cables. “What wasn’t severed was flooded by millions of gallons of water from the broken water mains,” O’Rourke told his London audience.
He predicted that in a major disaster, cell phones would not be helpful for emergency communications because of the overload on the system. The prediction was borne out after the London bombings, he found. What does work besides two-way radio communication, he said, is wireless e-mail through portable devices like the Blackberry. Because e-mail is not a continuous flow of data like voice communication, mail routing is more flexible and able to accommodate heavy traffic more easily.
Fortunately, the London bombings did not attack underground infrastructure directly. They were aimed at destroying transit vehicles and tying up the transportation system. But the underground utility systems of large cities remain highly vulnerable to damage.
“We have been building for ourselves a more and more complex world and packed our systems below street level with more and more different components, often with little planning or integration,” O’Rourke pointed out. “These systems have accidents without terrorists. We’d like to make them work better under normal circumstances. Irrespective of terrorism, there’s a lot to be gained.”
—Bill Steele, Cornell News Service
