What works at the waterworks

Jan 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Randy Southerland

Covering more than 550 square miles southeast of metropolitan Los Angeles, the Eastern Municipal Water District serves more than 400,000 residents of western Riverside County with water and sewer services. Each day its 480 employees fan out to operate and maintain a vast array of sewage treatment plants, water towers, water meters, lines and pump stations.

The management of the Eastern Municipal Water District has always been concerned with providing access control and security for the facilities, protecting employees and contractors, and preventing theft of valuable equipment. For 12-year veteran facilities manager Chuck Kratch it hasn't always been easy to handle security demands in the fast-growing suburban area. Diverse locations had different and sometimes incompatible systems. Storage areas for expensive equipment were protected by little more than a lock and a key. The district needed a state-of-the-art access control system that could meet its current and future needs.

Picture Perfect security The district installed Casi-Rusco's Picture Perfect access control system, which now ties together card readers at distant plants with a central database at the Eastern Water District's central operations and maintenance headquarters in Perris, Calif.

"They wanted a high-end access control system that was able to go on their network and could communicate to all of their remote sites via that network," says Yale Smith, regional sales manager for Apex Communications, the Corona, Calif.-based dealer that installed the system.

The need for a new system became apparent when the district moved into a new central facility located on a 53-acre site. This expansive tract included two large buildings joined together by a breezeway along with maintenance wings and several storage facilities. Block walls and a chain-link fence encircled the facility.

"This location is in the center of our service area," says Kratch. "We used to be located on the far eastern side of our service area, 45 minutes away from our most distant site. Now it doesn't take more than 20 minutes to each site."

With district crews maintaining more than 300 separate facilities, Kratch says the move boosted efficiency.

The district's system upgrade was conceived over a series of nearly 30 meetings between Apex and facilities officials. Smith and officials from Eastern Water District met frequently to compare notes and ask questions about what was available in the world of access control to meet their needs. The district also asked the company to look for other problems that might be more apparent to an outside expert.

Smith determined that equipment security and control were major concerns. The district maintains an arsenal of diverse components ranging from complex water valves costing $10,000 each to more than 300 vehicles. Several million dollars are invested in tools and equipment including cranes, backhoes and other expensive items that need to be protected.

"And they have parts rooms that contain water valves, pumps and all sorts of stuff that were disappearing," says Smith. "Just about anyone could go in and take them after hours. That's when we installed some secure doors and made it a controlled environment. Then we put in card readers and only allowed managers to have access and required signatures to get the access. We then put cameras on the doors to make sure there was no tailgating or cheating."

Smith notes that the system has paid for itself many times over by preventing equipment theft.

Regulating access The upgraded Casi-Rusco system - installed in late 1998 - brought about significant changes in the way the district handled access control.

"Each employee is issued an access control card with a picture ID or a photo card, and they are asked to wear them. We haven't forced them to wear them at this time," says Kratch "There are five double access gates - one side enter, one side exit - and each is controlled by a Casi-Rusco system. The computer is programmed to open two of the gates - the public access gates - every morning at 7:30 a.m. and then close them every evening."

To gain access, workers must flash their ProxLite badges in front of a proximity reader located on employee gates and exterior doors.

"It gives us a report of who enters and when," says Kratch. "Some managers use it to help them with weekend overtime, call-outs and so forth."

Cards also regulate the movements of contract personnel such as the janitorial service and the contract security service, which provides the physical security of the facility. "They patrol the facility and they monitor the monitors," he says.

The system has grown to more than 200 card readers. The treatment plants have about five readers each while the bulk is installed at the main facility.

Security, CCTV and fire are all monitored around the clock from a central control room manned by district employees. "The security guards keep in close contact with control room personnel. If anything goes wrong, they can call on each other," Kratch says.

They also monitor five sewage treatment plants that process more than 20 million gallons of water daily. Each plant has 12 to 15 employees and, at any one time, there might only be six workers on-duty at a plant.

Security is also maintained through 28 Burle (now Philips) color closed-circuit TV cameras tied into a Robot 96-E multiplexer that routes images to four monitors in the security station. "We record different tracks on the cameras because we only need four monitors for 28 cameras," says Kratch. "Two of the monitors have a full-time display of the five gates, the two lobbies and the board of directors' room. The remaining cameras are rotated over the other two monitors. So each monitor displays 10 individual cameras in sequence for 8 to 10 seconds."

Kratch notes that after all the cameras were converted to color only, they found the units didn't provide good images at night. They have since upgraded to dual-mode cameras, which can switch to black-and-white when light levels decrease.

Eliminating duplication Casi-Rusco has also developed a program to tie in the district's fire alarm systems with the main access control system. Apex installed a Notifier AFP 200 fire alarm panel that can be integrated into the Casi-Rusco system.

"They offer a software package that allows us to integrate the systems together so that the alarms will come up in graphical user interface in the control system," says Smith. He says that when the fire alarm system goes off it provides control room personnel with only a text description of the location of the problem. The new system will provide an actual floor plan of the building.

"It's a huge facility so it's hard to figure out from a text message the location of the problem," Smith says. "The system will notify the fire department, but the employees will also know internally what buildings to evacuate and what precautions to take until the fire department arrives."

Smith states that the district wanted to install this system to do some new things that the old system wasn't doing. Different departments - including security and human resources - needed to be able to access the database.

"Everyone wanted to have a different part of the same pie," says Smith. "We put a segregated database on the system so that each department could access the data they needed, but one division can't get into the other database."

Much duplication has now been eliminated.

"At these remote sites there used to be stand-alone systems," he says. "Now one card, one input and the one person who does the input will determine which sites an employee has access to and then it's done."

When a card is lost or an employee is terminated, the employee's department can delete it from the system. Previously, when an employee was terminated, the manager had to get in his car, drive out to the remote site and physically delete the card. Now security can put a hold on the card or delete the card. The system automatically updates all the remote sites.

Because the plants were required to handle harsh chemicals used in treating water, there was also a need for regulating employee access to certain areas of the plants for safety reasons.

"We used card readers on those rooms which would not allow access to anyone not certified to be there," explains Smith. "If someone went in there who wasn't familiar with all the equipment, he could hurt himself. The computer rooms also require controlled access as well."

The Eastern Municipal Water District is an example of how advancing technology has improved access control and security for a rapidly growing operation. By centralizing monitoring and information gathering on a single network, the organization is saving both time and - in an era of tight budgets - money.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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