The recent violent episodes instigated by extreme sports fans in Athens, following a volley ball match between the two major clubs, Panathinaikos and Olympiakos, left a policeman fighting for his life after a flare shot by a fan, severed an artery in his thigh, causing a cardiac arrest that has left him in a coma.
As the chaotic scenes of thousands of flares and riot police made headlines across the world, and on the screens of Antenna TV in her parents’ home in Melbourne, Effie Sofronidis, the Greek Australian Head of Quality, Research & Development at the Australian company GreyScan felt they had the solution to help deter these dangerous incidents in her country of origin.
“As soon as I saw the flares and riots I was onto the team here, as this is exactly what we do,” she told Neos Kosmos.
Fast, accurate, portable and easy to use, their Explosive Trace Detector ETD-100 which is manufactured in Australia by GreyScan has been designed to augment any security checkpoint scenario, from stadiums to border control, festivals and airports, detecting in less than a minute inorganic compounds commonly found in homemade explosives, such as flares and pyrotechnics, and even homemade bombs, which have become the biggest threat in terrorist activities across the world.
In an interview with Neos Kosmos, GreyScan founder and Executive Director, Jefferson Harcourt, told us that there’s nothing like the ETD-100 available in market, for detecting flares, and for many of the homemade explosives.
Flares and pyrotechnics commonly used at sports matches in Greece pose a challenge for security measures due to their composition—primarily inorganic with insufficient metal content for detection by standard metal detectors. These inorganic materials used in flares and pyrotechnics, are similar to those commonly used in homemade explosives.
Despite being banned with substantial fines in place, these items flood Greek stadiums during major sporting events. Fans employ various methods, from concealing flares in babies’ nappies to using unsuspecting individuals and even drones for transportation, rendering security unable to effectively prevent these hazardous explosives from entering the crowds. As a consequence numerous people suffer severe injuries, not to mention the health risks of the smoke engulfing the crowds, and the looming threat of a devastating fire in such densely packed settings.
The ETD-100 is already used by Australian Government agencies, and it has been deployed at one of the largest stadiums in the US, the Rose Bowl Stadium. At the moment it is also set to be trialled in Germany in the Bundesliga, to mitigate against the various risks should pyrotechnics and the like make their way past security checkpoints.
“Depending on where you are in the world, up to 90% of explosives, are not detected by the current trace detection technology. The reason is that those detectors were designed for the threat that existed 30 years ago, which is military grade explosives, high explosives, hand grenades, and so on,” Harcourt explains adding that since this time, terrorists have turned to homemade explosives often made with materials containing nitrates, chlorates, perchlorates. These are found in fertilisers and cleaning products.
There are at least two ways, that the ETD-100 can successfully be used in these events that attract thousands of spectators.
On the one hand, it can quickly and effectively detect at entry, people who have handled the flares or explosives, even if they are not in their possession, hence even if they smuggle them in through other ways.
“We’ve caught people who have worked with homemade explosives days and days before, because the residue sticks to your skin, even if you have a shower.”
On the other hand, this Australian device can prove effective in helping the police after the event, if an incident has occurred.
“If there is an incident, we can help the police identify and prosecute the perpetrators,” Harcourt continues. “If you’ve got the material all over your hands it’s very likely that you were involved in setting that flare off. So that’s that post-event analysis which is very important. And it acts as a deterrent too.”
After the near fatal incident in Greece, around 400 people were arrested and the police tested them for residue, Sofronidis explains. “The only way they can test properly, without a device like ours, is to send the samples away for laboratory testing which would be a very expensive and a very long process. There is no device currently used that does on-the-spot testing residue like ours does, and gives a result in 40 seconds.”
Though the technology is here, the process in adopting it has been incredibly slow and frustrating because of the standards that have to be updated.
The research for the design of an explosive trace detector that would pick up explosive compositions that contain inorganic materials began way back in 2004, by the University of Tasmania. It was then picked up and funded by the US government around 2014, before GreyScan Australia got involved, spending a few years in the engineering and development of the ETD-100, which was set to launch just as the COVID pandemic hit.
“Our key markets are border security and aviation. So COVID was a direct strike, and we had to hibernate the business. Our team actually dropped everything and started making ventilators for the Australian government.”
However the technology is now being adopted across the world.
“The American, UK and German governments are trialling us, and a number of countries have bought the ETD-100,” Harcourt continues, hoping that the process of updating the old standards in a very regulated market accelerates allowing for heightened security and the prevention of incidents that could prove catastrophic.
GreyScan was awarded the 2019 Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia.
*For more information visit greyscandetection.com