Terrorist attacks are just an unfortunate part of living in a big modern city, according to London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Unpleasant and a downer, but, hey, just think of all the lovely kebab restaurants — you wouldn’t want to lose those, now, would you? So they’re just something that city-dwellers have to get used to, kind of like Angelenos have to live with all those massive wildfires.
Because many of the recent jihad attacks in Western cities have used big trucks to accomplish their carnage, massive concrete blocks have been popping up all over the place in downtown shopping districts and places where large crowds gather.
Diversity Barriers. Merkel Legos. Shahid Bumps. Allahu Ak-barriers. Koran Blocks.
They’re everywhere now, ugly as sin, even when they’re all prettied up with Christmas Winterval wrap.
But are they effective?
The temporary, movable concrete barriers that are in use now all over Germany — the ones that look like giant Lego blocks — turn out to be absolutely no protection against a terrorist driving a large truck at a modest speed. The engineering study shown in the video below used ten-ton trucks travelling at 50kmh, which is a little over 30mph — not very fast at all. Watch what happens when they hit the Shahid Bumps.
Many thanks to the anonymous translator, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
| 0:00 | The truck… and a row of concrete blocks: the so-called Nice stones. | |
| 0:05 | They should protect us from truck attacks. Now the truck and the concrete bollards | |
| 0:11 | meet in a controlled manner. For the first time in Germany, | |
| 0:16 | Umschau tests whether these stones actually protect us. | |
| 0:21 | Stockholm last Friday. A nightmare becomes real again: | |
| 0:27 | a terrorist speeds through the pedestrian zone with a truck. | |
| 0:33 | Four people die. The incident shows anew the deadly dangers of truck assassinations… | |
| 0:39 | …just like earlier in Nice with 84 dead… | |
| 0:47 | …and on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz with eleven dead. How can such amok runs be prevented? | |
| 0:55 | These firmly built-in vehicle barriers count as quite safe. | |
| 0:59 | Here is the crash test video from a manufacturer. | |
| 1:02 | They manage, in most cases reliably, to stop trucks racing onto them. However, | |
| 1:09 | they are expensive and just too complex to build in. Therefore, they are | |
| 1:15 | hardly suitable for large events and functions. | |
| 1:23 | DEKRA’s crash test center in Neumünster by Hamburg. Umschau wants to find out here if these | |
| 1:28 | mobile counter-terror stones bring safety, too. We build a concrete barrier which is common | |
| 1:33 | at folk festivals and markets. We utilize stones with a weight of 2.4 tons, | |
| 1:39 | the heaviest ones there are in Germany. | |
| 1:46 | Our truck is loaded to a gross weight of 10 tons. | |
| 1:51 | A steel wire rope in the ground will promptly accelerate it to 50 kph. | |
| 1:56 | Whether the stones can halt it, these gentlemen ask themselves that, too. | |
| 2:01 | They are producers and sellers of such concrete barriers. | |
| 2:05 | Thomas Pampel, general manager, StoneLand GmbH Hamburg So far no tests have been known to us in Germany, or in Europe either. |
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| 2:10 | Marcus Gärtner, project leader of crash tests, DEKRA It may be that the steps [of the truck] or the concrete bollard |
|
| 2:14 | becomes entangled with the axle, the tires, and thereby [the truck] is disabled. | |
| 2:18 | Thereby the vehicle is brought to a halt. That can happen, too. | |
| 2:22 | One does not know until after the attempt. | |
| 2:25 | Nobody so far knows how safe the concrete blocks are. Yet they are deployed | |
| 2:30 | across the board, like here in Magdeburg for the Christmas market… | |
| 2:35 | …or in Erfurt… …in Leipzig… | |
| 2:39 | …and in Dresden. For the Day of German Unity 2016, half of the city gets covered with bollards. | |
| 2:43 | The costs for the concrete blocks alone: 80,000 euros. | |
| 2:47 | Thus the stones are actually just a makeshift solution. | |
| 2:52 | They are manufactured in various factories, among others | |
| 2:57 | here at the firm Nordmineral in Dresden. Originally, partition walls were made out of them. | |
| 3:03 | After the attack in Nice, authorities then discover the stones as truck barriers. | |
| 3:11 | Knut Seifert, operations manager, Nordmineral Dresden And these should halt the vehicles. I think, I can definitely imagine |
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| 3:15 | that they do halt them, since they have | |
| 3:19 | relative large balance via the size of the locating surface and the mass they bring along. | |
| 3:24 | Back in Neumünster. Our test begins here now. At the first attempt, the truck will run | |
| 3:31 | into the cordon perpendicularly. The manufacturers of such stones who traveled here are tense, too. | |
| 3:38 | [The first trial run is being conducted.] | |
| 3:46 | ||
| 3:56 | The truck pushes the stones aside almost effortlessly. | |
| 4:05 | It races on almost unbraked. Only the cordon [wall] 25 meters farther brings it to a halt. | |
| 4:12 | Otherwise it would have continued at least another 50 meters. Slow motion shows: | |
| 4:19 | the blocks tear the front tires off the truck. | |
| 4:25 | Now the driver could not steer or accelerate any more… | |
| 4:32 | …but the energy of the truck is so high that the stones cannot halt it — and this at only 50 kph. | |
| 4:41 | [Marcus Gärtner:] There is merely a bit of concrete spalling here and | |
| 4:45 | at this area where it crashed into, but otherwise | |
| 4:48 | the whole concrete block is still quite intact. | |
| 4:52 | What it tells us is that the concrete blocks themselves do not halt much. | |
| 4:56 | This crash test from the internet using a bus shows that, too. | |
| 4:59 | It has already been braked by the first barrier, | |
| 5:02 | yet it frontally breaks through the concrete cordon, too. The problem: at folk festivals | |
| 5:06 | like here on Domplatz in Erfurt, there is hardly any space in most cases. | |
| 5:12 | Therefore, counter-terror barriers can be built only | |
| 5:17 | a few meters from the booths. Despite concrete bollards, | |
| 5:23 | the truck could have seized Domplatz in Erfurt almost up to the middle. | |
| 5:30 | On the Altmarkt in Dresden, it would have even raced almost across the entire square. | |
| 5:38 | [Marcus Gärtner:] The vehicle had its axle torn off, so that the vehicle was disabled, | |
| 5:42 | thus it was not roadworthy any more. | |
| 5:45 | It led to the vehicle’s being slowed down a bit, but it continued relatively rapidly. | |
| 5:49 | Indeed, the retardation effect is relatively low. | |
| 5:52 | Second attempt. This time we decrease the gaps between the stones. | |
| 5:58 | With a second truck, we drive onto the blocks obliquely at 50 kph again. | |
| 6:04 | [Marcus Gärtner:] We hope indeed that thus the truck destroys the front axle on this item. Then | |
| 6:10 | the remaining three items absorb it, so that the vehicle hopefully | |
| 6:15 | does not break through and comes to a halt. | |
| 6:19 | The manufacturers of such stones hope so, too. | |
| 6:22 | Otherwise their business with the blocks would be in jeopardy. | |
| 6:25 | Jürgen Bitsch, sales manager, Neuland Beton Hamburg I can imagine that the vehicle now gets deflected, flung as specified. |
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| 6:30 | And then we must see what speed the vehicle still has after redirection or deflection. | |
| 6:35 | [The second trial run is being conducted.] | |
| 6:41 | ||
| 7:03 | The truck simply pushes the stones aside. Though it is thereby deflected, | |
| 7:07 | it is barely braked. Then it breaks through the cordon | |
| 7:11 | of the test site and takes one of the cameras with itself. It was not planned this way. | |
| 7:19 | ||
| 7:34 | The reason becomes clear quickly: the firm frame of the truck simply pushed the stones aside. | |
| 7:41 | [Jürgen Bitsch:] We hit it at the stiffest spot, namely, we see that, too… here… | |
| 7:45 | Then it is like when we play pool. —It is like that. | |
| 7:48 | —We push the bollard, and that was it. —Yes. —It is exactly like that. | |
| 7:52 | That is the best… that is the strongest in the whole [truck]. —Yes. | |
| 7:55 | Only the second cordon stopped the truck. In this arrangement, | |
| 8:01 | the counter-terror stones did not even destroy the axle like in the first attempt. | |
| 8:07 | [Thomas Pampel:] These are energies… that are not known. —And the two items at the end | |
| 8:11 | added nothing to the retardation. It was just the two-and-a-half-ton item that it pushed forward | |
| 8:15 | along with itself. —And then we have this game of pool effect again. | |
| 8:20 | Exactly. And once it slides, then it slides. | |
| 8:24 | And thereby the ton-heavy stones can themselves become deadly projectiles | |
| 8:28 | since the truck hurls them along with itself for several meters. | |
| 8:31 | [Thomas Pampel:] One has to be realistic. What we have seen here again and during the pretest, | |
| 8:37 | too, that is actually a pure placebo effect. | |
| 8:43 | It embodies something optically, but when the going gets tough, it poses an even bigger danger. | |
| 8:49 | The result is surprisingly unambiguous for the DEKRA, too: the counter-terror barrier has failed. | |
| 8:55 | [Marcus Gärtner:] This [barrier] is probably more of a mental thing. | |
| 8:59 | Reassurance for the visitor, that one sees that something is being done, | |
| 9:03 | but if somebody has really foreseen something, then it does not add much either. | |
| 9:07 | Umschau would like to show the tapes to the authorities in Erfurt, Magdeburg and Dresden, | |
| 9:11 | where the stones were deployed so far. However, besides the police in Dresden, | |
| 9:15 | nobody is willing to take a look at the pictures. | |
| 9:18 | The idea to deploy concrete stones in general emerged here, too, | |
| 9:24 | namely for the Day of German Unity 2016. | |
| 9:31 | Does it surprise you? —We absolutely had this option in perspective during operational planning | |
| 9:33 | René Demmler, Police Department of Dresden | |
| 9:37 | that it can happen that a truck breaks through, with the assumption | |
| 9:41 | that it would not be able to run any longer. | |
| 9:46 | That obviously happened here. Of course it is impressive in this trial | |
| 9:52 | configuration at what high speed the truck runs off. | |
| 9:58 | The City of Magdeburg imparts that by “spontaneous assessment”, | |
| 10:02 | the stones were deemed rational so far and deployed for protection. | |
| 10:07 | “If there are now additional, even more reliable insights, all the better. We will consider them… | |
| 10:12 | for the future.” Press Office of the City of Magdeburg | |
| 10:16 | The City of Erfurt has not even responded to our written inquiry. Now new ideas are asked for. | |
| 10:20 | In any case, just laying stone blocks is not sufficient. | |
| 10:24 | Otherwise a terrorist can simply play pool with a truck and ton-weight stones… | |
| 10:28 | and the lives of visitors at folk festivals. |
One would think that such tests had been done before the deployment of the concrete blocks, but that would be too scientific I guess. Just like computing the effects of a ten ton truck against a 2.5 ton barrier could be calculated with pen and paper, but that would be too scientific too, I guess. At least the cement factories are happy.
In fairness to the engineers, I think there are probably too many variables to be able to calculate it easily — the experimental approach is easier. There’s the weight (of both truck and barrier), surface friction, vehicle construction details, and undoubtedly many other things to take into consideration. Modeling it may be just as difficult as modeling “climate change”.
I agree calculating this thing would be a nightmare.
I’m an engineer and used to look for practical solutions.
Simply chain those blocks together with a steel cable like pearls on a string. This would increase their effectivenes by a factor of 2 or 3.
Yes, and here’s an idea: install permanent speed bumps in sensitive places, and then set the temporary barriers in front of them when required. That would prevent the long deadly skid of the Merkel Legos as seen in the second test run — they would stop at the speed bump (or so we would hope).
Well, even if you chain them together, that still leaves the door open for a 72 virgin-seeker with an explosive backpack.
I have another idea…. Just 3 years ago, Koran blocks were not needed.
Can we not simply revert to that state of affairs? Or would this be too impossible, or controversial?
And they haven’t even really started with the drones yet. That’s the likely next step: One drone to drop explosives or shoot bullets from 50 feet up, then another 100 yards further down the mall above the most likely path where panicked shoppers will flee, to drop acid or other poisons onto the packed crowd.
Cheap and relatively easy to put together. The glossy jihad magazines have already been talking about this sort of thing; I don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet.
Municipal authorities will have to cover all major shopping areas and festivals with elaborate bird-netting, high enough up to render drones harmless. I don’t know whether that can actually be done, but what else can they do?
People will stop shopping at brick-and-mortar places, and do it all online. Or fully enclosed malls will come back into vogue.
Mind you, the first governmental response will be to outlaw the private ownership of drones. I can see that happening even in the USA, because drones are not “arms”, and therefore are not protected by the Second Amendment.
If drones are outlawed, only outlaws will have drones! Mujahid outlaws, that is.
I mean – what is there to calculate? A ten ton object hitting a 2.5 ton barrier at speed? It is clear as day what part of the equation is going to be moved out of the way.
I agree they will have to chain the things together to make them work at least a little bit. In the end they will discover the unique qualities of steel barriers anchored in the ground.
But my point is mainly that they should have done the crash tests before deploying the bricks on the streets.
PS: If I remember correctly, the 90km/h speed limit for lorries and semis is because it has been proven that it is very hard to stop a loaded lorry. It’s almost impossible. A big semi truck transporting 40 tons of goods is as good as a train, when it comes to stopping it.
Go watch a 51,000lbs. (23 tonnes) FA-18E/F Hornet slamming down a carrier flightdeck with 142 knots (263 km/hr) and stopped by the arrestor cable in mere seconds absorbing the energy of three 10 ton trucks at 100 km/hr and tell me again it can’t be done.
Wouldn’t it just be simpler to keep out all the unassimilable salafists with their unkempt sharia-compliant beards and man-jammies? And deport anyone who professes such beliefs?
Unbelievable how much effort and money is expended to avoid pointing out the obvious…
The so called social experts, like to be seen to be doing some thing, yet can not even have a basic understanding of physics.
Mass x Velocity = Momentum
1o tonne x 5o kph = Much more that a 1 tonne or even 2 tonne block, with only a minor loss of velocity.
If loaded up to the legal limit of 40 tonnes.
Speed may even get up in certain situations to 100 kph.
The front axles may go, but it would not take much to fiddle the engine into a locked in driving mode, and the drive wheels will keep on driving, keeping the speed up.
The engineers already knew what it would take to stop a truck, but the costs are so high, plus the inconvenience of the permanence and bulk bollard fixtures.
Those bureaucrats would have most likely have been advised that those stone blocks would not work. If they were not, why did they not inquire with roading, engineering, companies, etc.
Pure negligence, and murder. No real concern in protecting and serving their own people.
Just like not reading the koran chronologically taking the abrogation verses, and the keys of the hadith and sira.
I think you’re absolutely right. The German leaders were concerned with looking like they were doing something. They actually didn’t care in the least whether anyone was actually protected.
So, the two hypotheses to explain the third-world government competence is 1)the bureaucrats are acting locally to benefit themselves only; or 2)the bureaucrats have ingested the nation-merging philosophy of globalism and Coudenhoff-Kalergi and in contrast to trying to prevent mayhem, they actually seek it.
A third alternative is pure incompetence. But as you pointed out, it is unlikely they would have run into a German engineering firm that wouldn’t have told them their blocks were inadequate.
The last defense would be armed citizens, who could at least shoot at the Muslim driver leisurely running them over. By coincidence, the EU is tightening its restrictions on personal arms.
The EUrabian Dialogue in the 1970’s offered the OIC all the hard agreements and a huge opportunity to colonise Europe.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/eurabia/oclc/5966570
Which is indeed what they did, after drooling over Cordoba, they went away and discussed “the propagation of Islam on a world level, and the establishment of a Jihad Fund…this fund is open with no restrictions…in all fields of Jihad”,
and of course building lots of “cultural centers'” in Europe.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/06/eurabia_conspiracy_or_policy_1.html
Kalergi made no provision for Islam becoming embedded in Europe and indeed, thought to ‘Europeanise’ MENA.
He also did not want large numbers of Africans in Europe, what a racist!!!
Other elements of Kalergi’s ideas are also turning out to be the opposite of his original intent; the increasing numbers of Jews fleeing Muslim anti-Jewish hatred for one.
The ‘Eurocanadian’ does a pretty good job of describing the:
Kalergi’s ‘pan-Europa’
http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2015/02/ideological-and-geopolitical-origins-of-eu-richard-von-coudenhove-kalergis-pan-europa.html
‘Ideological and Geopolitical Origins of the EU, Part II: Islamization, Mass Immigration, and Destruction of European Ethnicity’
http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2015/03/ideological-and-geopolitical-origins-of-eu-islamization-mass-immigration-and-destruction-of-european-ethnicity.html
In short, realpolitik swept aside Kalergi’s peculiar mix of Victorian civilising mission and progressive notions of miscegenation.
Elements of his ideas are no doubt present in current progressive agendas but the OIC has quite a different agenda altogether and they’re the ones setting the tone.
The globalists and EUers have even provided them with a convenient big lie, with which they can obscure the Hijrah.
‘Islamic Org Claims Europeans Need Millions of Muslim Migrants to Pay Their Pensions’
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/12/08/europe-needs-muslim-migrants-pensions/
Kalergi was a classic crank: a prolific author who pulled fantasies out of his head and made totally contradictory ideas sound like they made sense. His ideas made no sense, but appealed to weak-minded idealists who didn’t like to be bothered with actual analysis. Unfortunately, this included most of the present West European leaderships.
Kalergi was what some would call an “evil genius”. He actually did make interesting observations on culture and character, urban versus rural, intellect versus tradition. The net direction of his work, though, was completely negative.
“Europe must at all costs prevent ‘that great numbers of black workers and soldiers immigrate to Europe'”
I wonder what the odds are that Sow Merkel or her relatives has financial stake in any of the firms that manufacture diversity bollards? Never let a good crisis go to waste, eh?
“How can such attacks be prevented?” The solution really is obvious, but unpopular…
I’m sure the 80 000€ used to put up those blocks could’ve deported many who are part of the problem.
There’s this old anti-tank barrier “Czech hedgehog” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_hedgehog ), I’m sure the design would work in concrete as well. The Germans copied out design even during WWII, although their steel was of much lower quality and less effective, but I’m sure even hobby market steel beams welded in that design would be more useful than Merkel’s blocks. That is, if anyone from the politians would be actually honestly interested in the safety of the citizens.
It is an example of what happens when one only attempts to treat the symptoms of a disease rather than attacking and eradicating it at source. Cause equals effect, not vice versa.
If this wasn’t so serious, it would be funny. Talk about treating the symptoms and not the disease.
It reminds me of TSA in the airports
And about as effective. They will be patting down and molesting little old German ladies who wish to rent a truck while Mohammed Mohhamed just goes and slits the throat of a commercial driver and steals theirs.
That’s exactly the right comparison.
Exactly, why spending millions wasting money for nothing, just deport this illegal economic parasites, and problems solved, are this politicians for real ???, they don’t know anybody with suicidal vest can just walk, to the crowd, and any concrete wan’t help ?
I go for a comment that was published on Facebook in German.
It is Occams Razor:
Who is not here (in Germany), cannot stab (a German in Germany).
Who is not here, cannot rape.
Who is not here, cannot kill.
Simple as that.
In case you missed It those useless blocks cost 80.000 EUROS EACH!
I don’t read that as 80,000 apiece, but as 80,000 to place them all over Dresden on German Unity Day.
A cubic meter of concrete costs abot 130 euros and weighs almost 2500kg; so three blocks will not cost more than 1000 euros. So 80000 should buy you 200–300 blocks, which seems plausible for the whole city.