You’re looking at a specially built barrier stopping a truck. That much is obvious. What you may not know is that it’s developed by Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute, under contract by the US State Department and it has only one purpose: to stop explosive-laden trucks travelling up to 50mph dead in their tracks. As you can see, it’s quite effective at that. The idea is to place it in front of high-value targets, like embassies. And as you can probably imagine, survival of the occupants wasn’t part of the engineering equation. Considering they’re hurling themselves at a building in order to blow it up anyway, it would have been silly to even care about this.
There’s no word on where or even if this barrier will ever be deployed, but just knowing it exists can inspire a little bit of confidence that embassies could eventually be protected from the kind of attacks that killed over 200 people in 1998.
[ Texas Tribune ] VIA [ Jalopnik ]
