The impact of explosive weapons on urban services: Direct and reverberating effects across space and time

This article reviews the factors that determine the impact of explosive weapons on urban services in space and time, with a focus on drinking water services. The evidence comes from published and unpublished research and records, as well as experience restoring or maintaining such services. Urban services are seen as interconnected, and each composed of interdependent components of people, consumables and hardware. Elements that make up the components are labelled “upstream”, “midstream” and “downstream”, to reflect their location and hierarchy in the production and delivery of any urban service. The impact of explosive weapons is broken into the direct effects on any of the components of a service, and the reverberating effects on up- and or downstream components of the same service, or on other services. The effects are most commonly observed in service infrastructure, and determined chiefly by the extent of the damage to the functionality of any component. The spatial extent of the impact is found to be determined primarily by the hierarchy of the component suffering the direct impact, with attacks on upstream components being the furthest-reaching. The duration of the impact is determined primarily by the pre-explosion “baseline resilience” of the service, itself a function of system redundancies and emergency preparedness and response. The analysis suggests that the impact is more reasonably foreseeable than may commonly be thought, in the sense that the direct effects of explosives are well known and that the most important infrastructure is generally identifiable. It follows that proportionality assessments which involve urban services would benefit from (i) the direct and consistent engagement of specialized engineers within the targeting cell, and (ii) greater familiarity of the weapons controller with services, infrastructure and systems in urban areas.