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Air Cargo Carrier's CCTV System Helps Cut Theft and Flow of Illegal Drugs THE CHALLENGE: Miami-based Challenge Air Cargo is the largest mover of fresh-cut flowers from Central and South America and also imports fresh vegetables, seafood, hardware and computer components. Overall, it is the third largest cargo handler at Miami International Airport. "The federal government is making it disastrous for a company to be caught, even unwittingly, bringing drugs into the U.S.," said international security consultant Harold Frank. Frank, based in Boca Raton, Fla., is the Southeast regional director for the National Cargo Security Council, a coalition of government and private interests dedicated to the safe and secure movement of the nation’s cargo. Challenge retained Frank to design a state-of-the-art security system for the company’s new 165,000-square-foot cargo center and headquarters at Miami International Airport. Challenge’s board of directors asked for a total system to protect the company and its clients. Frank said his philosophy in designing the system was simple - he just assumed that every single person might be a thief or drug smuggler. With that in mind, he created a $500,000, 108-camera system capable of monitoring virtually the entire center, inside and out. THE TECHNOLOGY: Three outdoor American Dynamics® 1265 Tracker Domes from Sensormatic Electronics are equipped with 15:1 zoom lenses to watch the 200-foot-long front perimeter and gate where trucks enter the facility. Another Tracker Dome watches a 70-space employee parking lot on the south side of the building. An additional parking lot, located on the building’s roof, is viewed through two black-and-white Tracker Domes with 10:1 zoom lenses. Six black-and-white Tracker Domes, four with 10:1 zooms and two with 15:1 zoom lenses, watch over the rear side of the building. This area includes the tarmac where Challenge’s fleet of Boeing 757 aircraft pull up to unload their cargo. One color Tracker Dome, with a 15:1 zoom, is mounted in the center of the building’s roofline. Inside the building, running down the center of the 28-foot-high ceiling at 35-foot intervals, are four indoor color American Dynamics 1261 Tracker Domes. They monitor activity on the cargo floor. "The cameras have been mounted to provide four overlapping views," Frank said. "This way, we get uninterrupted pictures without having to wait for a pan/tilt unit to move and focus. By proper design and placement, this allows us to have more than one camera viewing any one scene continuously and during playback lets us recreate the movements of an individual." All perishable items needing to be stored in the center’s massive 26,000-square-foot cooler are x-rayed as they pass to the customs-cleared side. High resolution American Dynamics 650 black-and-white cameras are focused on both the x-ray’s input and output to watch the movements of the objects and the operators’ hands. All this video information comes together in a central monitoring station. The video routes through an American Dynamics 2052 matrix system. The unit controls up to 512 cameras and 32 monitors. The video is then processed by nine Robot® multiplexers from Sensormatic, providing simultaneous display and recording. Sensormatic’s Excalibur graphical system manager provides complete integration of the entire CCTV and access control systems from a single workstation. The Excalibur system allows users to define floor plans of the surveillance areas and provide user-selected icons to represent key security resources available. The system controls cameras, pan/tilt/zooms, lights, locks, VCRs, card readers and other security components. All cameras are recorded 24 hours a day on nine American Dynamics 8025 24-hour time lapse video recorders. The video is viewed on nine 19-inch color monitors. Single monitors are also located in the offices of Challenge’s vice president of operations and the facility’s local manager of security. THE SOLUTION: All 500 of Challenge’s local employees – and vendors or other visitors – are closely monitored as they enter the compound and move about within the cargo handling and other areas. The CCTV system is designed to be largely self-monitoring. Challenge Air Cargo has the ability to recreate events on videotape. By reviewing the tapes, they can switch from camera to camera to follow a perpetrator throughout the building. Then they record only those scenes in which the person appears, leaving an uninterrupted video trail of his actions. All frames are time/date stamped to preserve their admissibility as evidence in court. RETURN AND INVESTMENT: "The products chosen for this project were those that best met the needs of Challenge Air Cargo," Frank said. "Of course, we hope it will help us to control internal and external theft. Cargo theft is a major problem in Miami, where losses are about $140 million annually. But we also feel a deep responsibility to make sure we aren’t being used to smuggle drugs into the country." VITAL STATISTICS:
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