Terrorist bombings, until recently, were mainly thought of in the Middle East, South America, England and Ireland. Even after the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, most observers believed that terrorist attacks in the United States would be a unique event. The headlines that describe a radical fundamentalist group hitting a major landmark in the city did not cause much concern for the rest of the country. In fact, only the major coastal cities seemed preoccupied enough to prepare for terrorist attacks. On April 19, 1995, the other 90 percent of the population of the United States was forced to perform an important control of reality when one of their own people struck in the heart. A former US soldier and paramilitary activist reported that he detonated the largest terrorist bomb on US soil, killing 169 people and wounding countless others.
While the probability of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack has probably changed a bit, it is still infinitely low and the cost of that attack continues to skyrocket. According to The Sentinel (Vol. I, No. 3, Third Quarter 1993), a publication of industrial risk insurers, the explosion has the highest average dollar loss of all hazardous events. Therefore, another cost factor going into today's construction and construction operation economy is explosion mitigation costs. The owners and developers of buildings, headed by the United States government, are closely examining the incorporation of measures to alleviate the effects of a terrorist attack on their buildings. Military installations for years have been designed to withstand conventional weapons or blast attacks, with the sole focus on maintaining the structure in order to maintain mission. For commercial buildings, the most important design consideration is building life-saving buildings in the event of a terrorist attack. There is absolutely no concern to save the structure apart from saving people.
Many articles have been written about the cost and appearance of designing military-type facilities for civilian use. In addition, the design of commercial buildings as military installations is very impractical, since ordinary people do not want to work in bunker type buildings. Commercial buildings have a very different purpose and therefore should be designed to a different standard. Accepting that fact, commercial buildings must be designed to withstand a certain amount of attack, which means that they are designed to allow limited localized damage - not total failure - to allow rescue teams to evacuate victims. Our goals as structural design professionals are two: to design safer buildings that will not fail when attacked and to help rescue professionals enter a damaged building to care for survivors. This can only be done if the building has been properly constructed, which is where the structural engineer and the explosion consultants enter the picture.