ABSTRACT
Introduction An effective and efficient transportation system is vital for any city hosting the Olympics in order to get people into the country, move them around the host city and transport them to and from the Olympic venues. Thus any attack that shuts down the transport network has a direct impact on the Games and arguably is an attack on the Olympics itself, regardless of whether the actual venue is targeted or not. This chapter outlines the four primary types of transportation system, road, rail, air and marine, that would be used to move people to and from an Olympic venue, both from outside the country and internally. The discussion is developed by examining the various methodologies that may be deployed to protect such a system from terrorist attack and their relative effectiveness and ability to protect the travellers on the different systems. A total of 2,676 people were killed in transport accidents in the UK in 2008 (averaging at approximately eight deaths per day) (Office for National Statistics, 2009) and, although these deaths are tragedies for the families involved, they barely feature in the public consciousness. The Pan American 747 flight that was destroyed over Lockerbie in December 1988 as a result of a terrorist bomb killed 270 people, and the repercussions are still making headlines over 20 years later. Similarly, the London bombings of July 2005, where 52 people were killed, also feature in the media with persistent regularity. To give some context to these figures, the police investigation for 7/7 took 14 days to gather the evidence from the scene before one of the damaged trains was removed from the tunnel for further forensic examination: 14 days in which around 112 people were killed on UK roads. The author spent ten days working in Scotland on the Lockerbie investigation and during this period there were approximately 80 people killed on UK roads. While the numbers of these road deaths hardly seem to feature in the minds of the public, it seems that the deaths of the people at the hands of the terrorist reverberate for years. Is it this public consciousness that makes the public transport systems such an attractive target for terrorists? Ultimately, these types of attack achieve two aims for the terrorist groups: they terrorise the public and they cause substantial economic damage to the infrastructure. Under such circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that most reviews of
terrorist attacks typically find that between 30 per cent to 42 per cent of all terror assaults are directed against mass-transportation systems (Dolnik, 2007). Certainly, there is no sense that the current terrorist interest in striking such targets has diminished. In an analysis of the Mumbai train attacks in July 2006, which resulted in 209 deaths and over 700 people being injured, Chakravarthi (2006) argues that masstransit systems are the preferred target of choice for terrorists because they present high concentrations of people and provide ample scope for large scale destruction. Besides facilitating travel and mobility for the people, a nation’s economy hugely depends on the road and transit systems. Hence, sabotaging them is akin to killing two birds with one stone – terrorising the population and causing economic damage. The media response to these attacks arguably reinforces public anxiety and helps to create the atmosphere that the terrorist is seeking to achieve. In 2004, in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government built a significant extension to the public transport network in order to increase daily capacity by four million extra passengers (ABC News, 23 June 2008). For the Athens Olympics, the estimated number of spectators was five million (Loucopoulos and Prekas, 2003). These figures illustrate with stark clarity the importance of public transport systems in getting spectators to and from Olympic venues. Most capital cities experience severe road congestion every day of the week and, given this typical state of normality, it is simply not possible to move large numbers of Olympic spectators around without relying upon mass-transit systems. As noted in earlier chapters, we have seen in many of the terrorist attacks that have taken place across the globe that the current international terrorist methodology is to kill large numbers of people. The very fact that high numbers of people attend major sporting events renders them and busy transport modes an attractive target for terrorist organisations. The UK’s 2000 Terrorism Act defines terrorism as ‘the use or threat of violence to intimidate the public or a section of the public’ (Walker, 2002). Bearing this in mind, we can see that Olympic events provide an ideal platform for a terrorist group aiming to kill or injure large numbers of people – hence, the substantial resources that are invested in detecting, deterring or disrupting terrorist attacks. Of course, many spectators to Olympic events will travel from outside the host country, so, in examining transport security, we need to assess all the modes of transport that will be used during such an event. As people will be arriving by air, sea or land (either by rail or road), transport security needs to consider all of these modes, some of which will be easier to secure than others.
