Introduction

Life threatening events of explosion fire and impact of heavy fallen or moving objects in accidents or in incidences of acts of terrorism, crime or social unrest have always been of great concern to our community. Structural engineers who have been entrusted to ensure safety of the building occupants can be held accountable for poor structural performance in these extreme events. However, the amount of advanced technical education that can be obtained from an undergraduate engineering degree program on the related topics is typically limited because of their very specialised nature. This two-day short course aims to introduce key fundamental concepts and up-to-date knowledge, from theory to practice, that are required for the design and assessment of buildings for countering this type of threats.

The short course features:

· Description of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and an example
demonstrating the temperature evaluation of steel joist beams using a current calculation method.

· Lessons learnt from bombing at Oklahoma 1995, bombing of the Jakarta Australian Embassy 2004,
and other major incidents.

· Lessons learnt from the progressive collapse on the Seoul Departmental Store.

· A new approach to blast resistant design and simplified hand calculation method for practising
engineers.

· Simplified hand calculation method for analysing the effect of the impact of a heavy fallen, or moving,
object on a structural beam, or column.

· Analogy of calculation for seismic, impact and blast actions in a unified framework.