The chief of the Department of Homeland Security’s new office that oversees development, acquisition and deployment of much of the nation’s sensors and networks for detecting weapons of mass destruction is planning to begin replacing the national biological threat detection system called BioWatch with a widely deployed network of sensors that can help authorities more rapidly detect, identify and react to a potential incident.
It takes a day now for the relevant authorities to know that deadly pathogen may have been released into the environment and “that’s not really an acceptable answer,” Jim McDonnell, the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD), said on Monday. BioWatch is a manually-intensive system and isn’t automated or integrated in substantial way.
Under the “general” concept of operations being considered for the replacement to BioWatch, that time from detection of a potential threat to a decision to confirming there is a threat and reacting to it will be 10s of minutes to several hours, McDonnell said at an industry day event to outline the strategy and vision of the CWMD office, which stood up last December. Throughout the continuum of detection to response, there will be “real-time decision-making” going on, he said.
BioWatch works as intended but the technology is the same as was deployed in 2003 and it needs to be replaced with the next-generation of systems and sensors, McDonnell said.
McDonnell says his plan is to leave government service in three years and by that time he wants to have a “working capability” for a BioWatch replacement. A pilot phase with the replacement system could begin in “a couple of years,” he said.
McDonnell also said the development of a new system will be driven by capabilities as they exist rather than an imposed timeline. An important factor will be understanding what normal environmental conditions are in given areas, which could take at least a year to know, he said.
“We’re pretty comfortable we can do that,” he said.
The CWMD office is consolidating the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and Office of Health Affairs (OHA). DNDO is responsible for developing and buying the various radiation detection equipment used by DHS components at air, land and sea ports of entry and in the maritime environment.
OHA, among other things, supports BioWatch, which consists of air sample collectors distributed within 34 major urban areas of the U.S. The samples are collected every day and sent to local or regional laboratories for analysis to check if a potential threat has been introduced into the local atmosphere. From the time of sample collection until laboratory confirmation can be more than a day.
McDonnell said that beginning with his office’s FY ’19 budget request, which totals $429.3 million, the different budget categories are essentially operations and support, research and development, and acquisition, without over specifying programmatic details.
“We want to be able to respond to threats regardless of the threat vector that they’re coming from and do a good job on it,” he said, noting that in previous budget the funding allotted to chemical threats was around $800,000 and for nuclear threats about $350 million.
While “parity” between these accounts isn’t necessary, having a “legislative cap” on the chemical program “doesn’t give you much flexibility to do much,” McDonnell said.
McDonnell provided a glimpse of how he sees the operating concept playing out for the replacement system for BioWatch. He envisions networked “triggers” that sample the air and provide real-time alerts to relevant authorities, including at DHS, the FBI and Health and Human Services. This technology is available today, he said.
Field testing of these triggers will begin this year to monitor the air and obtain data, McDonnell said. His office will also begin to “look at the data analytics we can put behind that.”
The triggers would be deployed in the 9,000 federal buildings and facilities protected by DHS’ Federal Protective Service across the U.S., McDonnell said. He added that further deployments could be accommodated by incentivizing the private sector, naming venues like Madison Square Garden in New York City and the Charles E. Smith commercial realty company in the Washington, D.C. region.
Following an alert, trained first responders, whether that’s a fire fighter, a hazardous materials responder, or someone else, would arrive on scene with a handheld assay kit to test for the biological threat, which could be anthrax, smallpox, or something else. That kit would also be networked so that results are provided in real time. If there is a positive result, say for anthrax, then a second test would likely be done using the kit to confirm the result, McDonnell said.
From the time an alarm is triggered until a first responder gets results from a handheld kit could be 20 to 30 minutes, allowing an incident commander to begin making decisions to protect lives and contain a situation, such as ordering air handling systems be shut off and contamination controls, McDonnell said.
Meantime, the sample would be sent to a lab for further analysis. The laboratory results would let HHS know how to appropriately respond with the right pharmaceuticals and how many, he said. The laboratory analysis would take two to three hours, McDonnell said.
Outlining the business case for the next-generation biothreat detection system, McDonnell said the prospect for multiple sensors at each of the 9,000 federal facilities allows for more opportunities than the current 34 city BioWatch system that is based on old technology. On top of that are the equipment and training that first responders will need as part of the replacement system.
“Now you’re talking tens of thousands of sensors,” he said. “Truly national deployment and thousand and thousands of pieces of handheld gear for people to do alarm adjudication. And couple that with big data analytics, and the ability to move data, understand the data, it becomes a system that from a business perspective starts looking at being enticing to be a part of in the solution set.”
McDonnell said the networking and data analytics for the replacement for BioWatch will be based on work underway to digitize and automate the networking of radiological and nuclear detection systems and other sensor types at the nation’s ports of entry and other pathways used to illegally bring drugs and contraband into the U.S. The networking of these systems is more manual today but as new systems are acquired, open architecture approaches will be paramount in order to integrate these, he said.
“Anomaly detection on the bio side is much more complicated than anomaly detection on the nuclear side,” McDonnell said. “So, the work that we’re doing on the nuclear big data analytics is going to be absolutely critical for us to be able to learn how to be able to do that on the bio side.”