The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) demonstrated a new concrete-busting tool this week at the 12th Annual Technologies for Critical Incident Preparedness Conference in National Harbor, Md. The Controlled Impact Rescue Tool (CIRT) — a 36-inch-long, 100-pound tool — is capable of breaching a reinforced-concrete wall.

In development since 2007, CIRT is designed to replace traditional concrete-busting tools like jackhammers that are used during natural disasters to determine whether life is on the other side of a structure, said Jalal Mapar, S&T program manager. Typically, search-and-rescue teams can take upwards of 50 minutes to break through 5- or 6-inch reinforced concrete using such tools. Instead, CIRT lets teams break-through in less than 8 minutes. In fact, during the demonstration, the unit punched through 6-inch concrete in 3 ½ minutes, Mapar said.

“That is at life-saving speed and four times faster than the current technology,” he said.

CIRT works similar to shooting a rifle, Mapar said. Inside the self-contained unit, a small rifle shell powers a piston that drives a metal piece the size of a coke can into the concrete. It then generates a shockwave in the concrete that crumbles it from the other side without damaging attached walls.

Mapar said it takes 30 minutes to train someone to use CIRT, so it’s easy to deploy it on the fly. The unit doesn’t have any external codes or produce the same amount of vibration as a jackhammer, so it reduces the fatigue and stress on firefighters’ shoulders.

“Users in the field indentified this as a core component, so CIRT minimizes that stress,” he said. “It now is less taxing physically on the rescue workers, so when they get through the concrete they still have enough energy to do a rescue.”

Raytheon brought CIRT to market earlier this year, and the tool now is on the General Services Administration’s schedule of products and services available for purchase by federal organizations and the military. It costs $16,000.