Boston attack highlights bomb squad shortfalls.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Homeland Security News

* The nation's 466 bomb squads have urgent needs for robots that can help them do their jobs, said a leading expert in counter-improvised explosive device technologies. The problem is that they don't have much money to upgrade their systems.

The Boston Marathon attack, which employed two explosive-laden backpacks, brought into sharp focus some of the shortcomings of the nation's bomb squads, particularly when it comes to robots, said Edwin Bundy, program manager of the improvised device defeat subgroup of the technical support working group at the combating terrorism technical support office.

A survey of the National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board showed a need for light, backpackable robots that can be used in emergency situations such as the one in Boston, he said at the National Defense Industrial Association Ground Robotics Symposium in Springfield, Va.

"It was really an eye opener to them because of the operations that were occurring," he said. The bomb technicians were on the move as events unfolded and couldn't bring with them the larger robots that are normally transported in a vehicle.

"They had to be running and gunning, if you will, with the SWAT teams," Bundy said.

"They needed something light, something that could deploy very, very rapidly that had manipulation and disruption capability," he added.

Improvised explosive devices remain the terrorists' number one weapon of choice globally and domestically.

A survey Bundy revealed at a trade show earlier this year showed that U.S. bomb-related incidents are underreported. Official federal statistics show that there are about 3,400 incidents every year nationwide. The findings said that number was 10-times larger, ranging from 31,000 to 34,000 every year. Some of these are hoaxes or suspicious packages that don't turn out to be bombs. But each incident requires a bomb squad to respond.

Many of these bombs are real, though, but they don't always grab the headlines. Bundy asked the audience of 120 if they had heard of the car bomb in Pennsylvania earlier in 2013 that leveled three homes. Only one person raised her hand. A man seeking revenge after a drug deal had gone wrong packed a car with 1,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate.

That incident pointed to the bomb squad commander's number one need: better robots to counter vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.

"We still at this point in time do not have what the public safety bomb squad...