Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

One of the factors in UK bin design in certain public places / spaces is blast resistance.

About 25 years ago I watched a documentary that focused on how the IRA were using litter and the bins themselves as shrapnel to ensure that small devices had a larger impact radius, especially in busy areas.

At the time this lead to a removal of bins in major public places (and they are still 100% absent from the tube system for this reason), and for those areas that required bins new designs were sought that were blast resistant.

Blast resistance in this context typically meant that the shell of the bin acts like a cannon, and the blast is directed upwards so that the impact radius is greatly reduced and the worst case is that trash rains down on people.

A lot of bins were replaced over the following decade, but this is not a requirement I see mentioned much any longer. Are other major cities factoring terrorism into their street furniture and garbage designs?

View on HN

Leaving a bag in the UK has always raised suspicion, hence leaving bombs in bins which were invisible. The added death and mayhem from the shrapnel was just a bonus.

When the IRA were using american funds to blow our kids up in the 80s and 90s, it was a more innocent time - nobody really considered a threat where the bomber would be willing to kill themselves as part of the attack - not in the west (and there'd only been the one suicide attack by the Palestinians), and much of the time there were warnings phoned in. Typical bombings were abandoned car/vans, bags or litter bins.

Nowadays the attack vector seems more knife crime or suicide bombing. There's far less now too.

I suppose the IRA was motivated more by real-world issues whereas Islamic (or otherwise) suicide bombers are often motivated by some kind of mythology involving an afterlife. Of course, IRA members were (almost all?) Catholic, but Christianity's notions of martyrdom are much more passive than those of Islamic fundamentalists.

I googled it and discovered that the pIRA did use human bombs, except that the human involved was under coercion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb

You're right about there being far fewer terrorist incidents now. I believe the London tube bombings of 2005 and Manchester arena bombing of 2017 were the only suicide bombings in the UK this side of the millenium.

Same in France, I still remember being young in Paris and seeing all metal trash cans disappear some time after the 1995 terrorist bombings [1] (which I feel not too many people outside of France remember).

I'm not sure if shrapnel projection avoidance was the number one reason in those instances since the bombs were already prepared with nuts and bolts as shrapnel but they definitely allowed large devices to be easily hidden in plain sight.

I can't remember how long it lasted but for what felt like decade most trash cans in Paris became metal circles with transparent plastic bags awkwardly hanging from them so the contents could be easily seen and it would be much harder (in theory) to hide a large explosive device in them. This resulted in a lot of mishaps with trash dropping all over the floor. Apparently it also worsened rat infestation since Paris' most recent trash can redesign focused on tackling this issue [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_France_bombings

[2]: https://www.cnews.fr/france/2019-06-02/paris-3600-nouvelles-...

Thats messed up. I cannot imagine living in such fear that my trash bags must be clear. It seems the problem is deeper than trash can design.

Hmm. I didn’t consider it like this, but the new Transbay Transit Center has trash cans of a similar design all around the rooftop park. They are enclosed, but the enclosure is completely transparent so you can easily see in the bags.

Honestly there’s a number of good reasons you might want that design though, e.g. needles have been an issue around San Francisco.

On the up side it would make it much easier for the homeless to spot and rescue recyclables from the trash.

It really isn't that bad. Compare it to school shootings in the US, you can take actions to prevent something without it being on your mind 24/7.

Nowadays in UK train stations most bins are simply plastic bags on a hoop - I presume this is to make it easier to spot explosives?

Yes, and to avoid the shrapnel problem

The shrapnel thing really trips my "that doesn't seem right" intuition WRT how explosions work, unless those bins had some really unfortunate design features. I believe someone official may have said that at some point and it may have been picked up in popular culture as a reason, but it strikes me as kinda "truthy", pending more info—I'd expect a container of that sort, especially with a bit of a gap between most of it and the device, to tend to break into a small number of large pieces with terrible aerodynamics, much of it bound generally upward and slowing a ton before reaching human-height again (assuming the bins were fairly big and the bags/bombs tended to end up at the bottom or middle), making shrapnel that's at best (well, worst, but you know) very marginally more effective than the bomb sans same shrapnel, if at all. Shrapnel that's big (tending to strike over a large surface area) and rapidly-slowing is fairly useless shrapnel.

The explanation that they were a good place to hide a largish bag so no-one would get suspicious about them seems entirely sufficient to explain why they were used, and why it might be a good idea to remove/disable them and replace them with something you can see the inside of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings

> The area was crowded with shoppers. Witnesses said that shoppers fled from the first explosion into the path of the second. It was later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast-iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/19/northernireland.d...

> Forty minutes later, a bomb hidden in a litter bin on the main concourse at Victoria exploded as police were carrying out a search, and while the rush hour was at its height.

> The dead man, a commuter, was the father of a 16-month-old child. He was killed by a shrapnel wound to the chest

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-young-boys-murdere...

> Hundreds of pieces of cast iron shrapnel from two litter bins, which had been blasted apart by Semtex, littered the shopping precinct

Ah. Yeah, thick-enough cast iron might do it. Doesn't break fast enough.

[EDIT] I mean I guess I hadn't counted on the bins so strongly resembling actual bomb casings. Heh. Yeesh, that sucks.

[EDIT EDIT] doesn't break fast enough and is brittle. I was thinking something like sheet steel.

The bin became shrapnel, but I have to wonder how it compares to a pressure cooker full of nuts, bolts, and nails in terms of shrapnel production?

>I presume this is to make it easier to spot explosives?

Open hoop style trash cans (bag holders really) are faster and more efficient for the janitor to assess the fullness of a bag from across the station (and for the supervisor to assess the quality of the janitor's assessment) and if needed to grab the full bag out of the hoop and toss on a new one. The hoop cans themselves are cheaper too. Any benefit to the police is likely secondary to the day to day cost savings from making it easier (and therefore faster and therefore cheaper) for the janitors to do their jobs.

Tube stations do have bins now, but they're just clear bags on a hoop so that its easy to see the contents and so that there is nothing there to act as shrapnel.

You can still see in lots of stations where old bin were, often moulded into the walls and covered over with plates. Often they still say "Litter" above them.

>removal of bins in major public places (and they are still 100% absent from the tube system

Interesting. This might explain why in Chicago subways the "trashcans" aren't cans at all but collars with naked plastic bags suspended from them.

US Homeland Security seems aware: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/blast-resistant-trash-recept...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com