Prevention, rather than reaction, was the message July 25–26 at the AIA national component headquarters as the National Institute for Building Sciences Multihazard Mitigation Council convened a high-level workshop, "Vulnerability of Buildings to Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Attacks."

In attendance were public and private facility owners, federal officials, private-sector specialists, and executives from organizations representing design, construction, and security professions.

Presented in cooperation with the International Facility Management Association, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the two-day workshop pointed up the real threats government officials acknowledge and the preventive steps—from obvious to arcane—that building designers can take to mitigate the threat from airborne poisons and pathogens.

"We need to think about how we build our buildings and how we design and build our filtration systems," said Maj. Gen. Bruce M. Lawlor, senior director of the U.S. Office of Homeland Security (OHS) Protection and Prevention Directorate. The OHS has shifted its thinking, he said, from total reliance on inoculation to recognition of the importance of building design and indoor-air filtration, among other tactics, to keep people apart from airborne dangers in the first place. We need to "take this threat away from terrorists," the general said in his keynote address.

Luncheon speaker Dr. Jerome M. Hauer, synopsized many of the opinions expressed during the conference. There are many snake-oil salesmen in the chem/bio sensor/detector field, warned the assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Public Health Emergency Preparedness. Field testers are ineffective, he said. Although filtration systems are improving, there is no magic bullet for protecting against chemical/biological attack. We can narrow the likely chem/bio agents, though and prepare for the chemicals that are readily available on the open market, he said. Many of these—especially those used in industry and agriculture—move every day throughout the country by truck and train. The military agents, although more lethal, are hard to get and much less likely to be used as terrorist weapons, he said.

Hauer also talked of "weapons of mass disruption." A so-called dirty nuclear bomb—in which conventional explosives spread nuclear material—cause limited physical damage. But they have great psychological impact, he said.

Turning to biological/chemical threats, it is the HVAC system that is most vulnerable in a building, Hauer said. Moreover, these areas usually lack security. The potential for collateral damage in such an attack is driving his directorate to seek solutions, including design strategies, to protect HVAC systems.

Some sensible suggestions
With only 2 percent of the building stock being replaced each year, we need to concentrate on retrofitting existing buildings, added James E. Woods, PhD, PE, director of Building Diagnostics Research Institute. We need to focus on the buildings now in place because 80-90 percent of them will still be in service in 20 years, he pointed out.

Some solutions in lieu of nonexistent tech fixes, according to Tracy D. Cronin, program manager for the Navy Technical Support Working Group Combating Terrorism, include:
• Awareness training for building security and occupants
• Revising threat-communications, evacuation, and shelter-in-place plans
• Planning for HVAC systems maintenance during incidents of attack
• Isolating public access places, including negative pressure for areas of refuge, separate access and ventilation zones, and closed-circuit TV surveillance
• Implementing an array of building protection measures.

Nicholas Fioravante, senior vice president for Engineering Consulting Services, Consolidated Engineering Services, added some suggestions for addressing owner's concerns, which include cost control as much as increasing security. Owners are uncertain of what threats they might face. The perception of what could be a target is so broad that measuring what and who are at risk is extremely difficult. Moreover, the universal perception of ever-present but ambiguous danger is indeed real. There is no way to know where acts of terrorism might strike next. Although it is virtually certain that some acts of destruction, injury, and death will occur again in this country, the likelihood of it happening any one place is very small. This is the paradox owners face when weighing the cost of risk mitigation against actual risk. The lopsided balance between the rarity of a likely occurrence and the severity of damage a chem/bio attack would cause likewise brings into question the effectiveness of available security technology under field conditions.

Fioravante suggested several steps that most owners could follow to protect building users from airborne agents:
• Risk assessment and a cost/benefit analysis
• Preparedness Plans
• Implementation of general security measures
• Separation of mail processing
• Additional air filtering.

In the last discussion panel of the conference, Stuart Knoop, FAIA, of Oudens + Knoop Architects, pointed out the specialized nature of security risk assessment and mitigation. Architects need to understand the fine points of risk assessment even if the firm does not acquire the specialized knowledge to provide those services. Every architect needs to understand building security design because it is as much an element of new construction and renovation now as HVAC, lighting, or telecommunication systems.

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.