John Strutton, Safety & Crime Prevention Manager at Transport for London, spoke about Safe Transport Hubs in the UK’s Capital in the Safe Cities Academy 2014
From the Madrid train bombings of 2004 to the 7/7 tube bombings in London, a glance through the history of terror attacks reveals major transport nodes as a favourite target of terrorists.
There have been plenty of failed attacks too; in the US, for example, a plot to detonate explosives was foiled in 2009, while a year later a plot to bomb four Washington Metro Subway stations was also thwarted.
Chaotic and – most importantly – packed with passengers often in too much of a rush to notice suspicious packages or persons, major international train stations are perhaps the national infrastructure’s soft underbelly.
Mass transit systems are unavoidably less secure than the aviation sector or government buildings, where people can be scanned with metal detectors and frisked as they enter buildings through a single entrance.
With such a huge volume of passengers passing through multiple entrances at train stations it’s simply not practical or affordable to impose airport-style security on every passenger. Passengers simply wouldn’t tolerate the delays such vigilance would entail.
Random screening
In the absence of universal screening, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has pushed random screening to deter attacks. It’s a policy their UK counterparts have so far resisted.
Despite the NSA claiming to have foiled more than 50 plots since 9/11 and their UK counterparts 34 since 7/7, the feeling persists that mass transit systems merit better protection than they currently enjoy.
St Pancras (Photo:Przemysław Sakrajda)
Although 34 million passengers pass through US train and bus stations compared to the two million who board flights, only 2% of the TSA’s budget is dedicated to mass transit, dwarfed by the 75% lion’s share enjoyed by aviation.
There were 213 attacks on subways and trains worldwide between 1 Jan 2005 and 30 June 2010, compared with 197 attacks on aircraft and airports. In subway and rail attacks 700 people were killed, 3,262 wounded and 3,114 taken hostage.
In attacks in aircraft and airports, 238 people have lost their lives, 937 been wounded and 281 taken hostage.
If these numbers would seemingly buttress the case for a boost to mass transit counter-terror resources, the disparity in budgets nevertheless reflects an unsettling reality: there are limits to the level of protection the security services can provide.
“Mass transit systems in the US are vast, a literal black hole,” says James Carafano, a homeland security expert at The Heritage Foundation in the US. “They would consume every cent we spend on homeland security, and there still would be vast vulnerabilities.”
Intelligence
Given the challenge posed by a determined, armed terrorist arriving at Kings Cross or Grand Central, preventing him or her from even getting that far assumes greater importance than ever. It is through painstaking intelligence work, rather than intercepting would-be bombers at the station itself, that so many plots have been foiled.
Not that the scope of potential attacks is limited to stations themselves. Out-of-service carriages are vulnerable as they’re often poorly monitored. Trains can be targeted in between stations, rails, bridges and tunnels can be sabotaged.
However, as Ron Heil, a security consultant for transportation industry firm TranSystems, notes, it’s easier said than done. “The airplane can be used as a weapon of mass destruction, such as in the 9/11 attacks, and there is no recovering from even a small blast at 40,000 feet,” he said. “Trains must travel on rails, making them hard to steer into other targets but easy to attack externally on their routes.”
IFSEC International, which takes place between 17-19 June at ExCeL, London, will feature the following talks about security and transport:
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