For those who don’t know - todays Manchester United game was cancelled after a suspicious package was found at the stadium. Apparently this is the first time a Premier League game has been cancelled for security reasons.
This news feednotes that the package (some combination of pipes / cell phone) will undergo a controlled explosion. My question: Can they measure the force of the controlled explosion to determine if the suspicious package had explosives in it? I’m imagining something like a scaled up bomb calorimeterthat could measure the energy of the explosion, compare it to the amount of explosives added by the police, and determine how much extra energy, if any, was present. Or at least, at a high level, determine if there was likely more energy than the police added. Surely it must be useful for the police to know if there was actually any explosive in the suspicious package.
The point of a controlled explosion is to separate the device into its component parts. It’s a bad day at the office if the suspect device actually goes off.
Real world testing, we’d use a couple of strings of pressure sensors, high speed film cameras, fragment throw analysis, and maybe ground shock measurement. That’s for testing buildings, barricades, and configurations of material. Base testing of the explosive compound is at the laboratory level and scales pretty well.
Here, they have an accurate picture of the device (good); they’ll estimate the quantity of contained explosives; add in their contribution; and assume the worst (everything goes instead of interruption); figure up a safe area for shock wave and fragment throw and have a go at it. They may not know the exact explosive (if it’s red mercury, all bets are off) but there isn’t a huge difference between what’s available to a terrorist. They should probably assume it’s TATB which is pretty potent. They would do an analysis of tragment later to determine the compound used.
As for a measurement of the explosive/explosion - no. Not in the cards for a short time event like this impacting civilians. Any results from filming, debris fields, compounds would be added to databases of known IEDs or bombings.
Or better yet, the training devices should have been counted/recounted after the private testing company left the facility so they could make sure they brought them all back with them. Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but you don’t want a real terrorist to be able to right “FAKE BOMB” on the side of a real bomb and have someone just move it to a closet with plans of dealing with it next week.
Of course, now that I think of it, maybe fake/testing bombs could somehow be registered with the jurisdiction that they’re in and be given some kind of unique number or seal that stays with it so in this scenario the bomb squad could have shown up and recognized it right away.
OP … yes they have a video camera record the explosion.
The shock wave itself measures the explosion… its obvious from the video of the explosion in slomo how the controlled explosion went.
News today… the head of the security firm said two things today
it was labelled, with HIS mobile phone number on it. He wasn’t called, and no one connected up the training excercise in the last week with the little package labelled “Training … ACME SECURITY, please call ACME !”.
The head himself counted the number of training devicie recovered, he checked his bag, he counted one, he returned one. The mistake was that when he took his bag to the site, he had a device was already in it, so when he checked he had one, he didn’t recover the one actually used in training.
This is a repeat of the sydney ferries fiasco… Oh, oops, it was a training device left behind… well its happened other times too… training/test packages left in travelers luggage, and all that.
Thanks all for the responses. I hadn’t realized so much could be learned from high speed video and ground shock analysis. But it makes perfect sense.
As an aside - the match will be made up tonight. If Manchester United can win by 19 goals or more, they will finish in the top 4 of the Premiere League. Should be quite a game . . .
