A Gradual Retrofit

Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM

The City of Allentown, PA. — about 55 miles north of Philadelphia — is the third largest city in the state. That's a far cry from the rural village that the town's founder, William Allen, chief justice of Colonial Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, envisioned in 1762.

Allentown retained its small village stature up until America's industrial revolution and the emergence of a local iron industry. Around the same time, the town also saw the emergence of a school of higher education, Muhlenberg College. The college was founded in 1848 through the Lutheran Church “to provide a liberal arts education in the Christian humanistic tradition,” according to Muhlenberg's Web site.

Today, the college serves more than 2,100 students, focusing on pre-professional studies and liberal arts. The college property has grown to include a multitude of new classroom buildings, dormitories and M.I.L.E. (Muhlenberg Independent Living Experience) housing, but also retains many of its original edifices. The campus now encompasses 70 properties, including the M.I.L.E. houses, which are single-family homes converted into student housing.

The importance of life-safety protection

Muhlenberg is situated on a hillside in the west end of Allentown, an area with a moderate crime rate. Several decades ago, supporting a commitment to keep students and faculty safe in their home away from home, the school installed a fire-safety system.

Shortly after coming to Muhlenberg as the new campus safety director in 1987, Ken Lupole recognized a need to enhance the protection of students, faculty and property. He called upon a fire protection company, Simplex, to assess the college's fire alarm system requirements. The company, now known as SimplexGrinnell, a business unit of Tyco Fire & Security, has since provided fire alarm, fire sprinkler and security systems and service for the school.

In the decade following his arrival, a complete Simplex 2120 multiplexed fire alarm system was installed on campus. The security staff managed and controlled the system from the Life Sports Center.

Each building was already equipped with Simplex fire alarm systems featuring transponder-style fire alarm panels. Each system reported back to the central location.

Tom Dougherty, assistant chief of campus safety at Muhlenberg, explained the approach SimplexGrinnell and Muhlenberg used in developing a new retrofit solution.

“By 2003, The Muhlenberg's standalone systems needed to be migrated to a fully networked system,” Dougherty says. “At the same time, we wanted to change from keyed access to an electronic card access system.”

John Kurzeja, operations tech supervisor at SimplexGrinnell, and Carl Wunderly, a SimplexGrinnell sales representative, were given responsibility for a networked solution to provide fire alarm and security system technology. The system was implemented over time to stay within the college's budget and to avoid disruption and inconvenience to students and staff.

“During the planning stage, the fact that the college experiences many lightning strikes had to be considered,” Kurzeja says. “In the past, the fire alarm system was susceptible to damage because of the copper communications wiring between buildings. We addressed the problem by converting the communication loops to fiber optics.”

The ongoing retrofit project also had to be completed in phases.

“We often work during summer and school breaks, particularly in student dorms,” Kurzeja says.

The school has eight academic buildings and nine residence halls, all of which now have a Simplex fire alarm system and electronic access system (EAS) from SimplexGrinnell.

A networked fire alarm system

SimplexGrinnell installed a Simplex 4120 network fire alarm system that provides built-in system redundancy and the capability to support 50,000 addressable points along the system. The fire alarm network was developed with a mix of Simplex 4120 and 4100 control panels and nodes, depending on the size and scope of the protected environment.

Each building has its own panel, and each panel is a node on the network. Each panel box is interfaced to an Information Management System (IMS) operator management computer workstation. The IMS, located in the Campus Safety office in Prosser Hall, one of the school's main dormitories, provides alarm display, custom action messages for dispatchers and report generation of detector sensitivity.

“All of our alarms report in on one system now,” Dougherty says. “When we get an alarm, an officer still has to go physically to check the panel, but this enables dispatchers to view all the fire alarms from a central computer, and they are able to reset some of the alarms directly from the center.”

The M.I.L.E. house panels are not integrated directly into the network, but they report to a Sur-Gard Digital Alarm Communicator Receiver (DACR) that is integrated into the IMS. The built-in DACR allows Campus Safety to monitor both fire and security alarms from remote locations.

Retrofit challenges

Each building presented its own challenges during the retrofit process. The original section of the Life Sports Center has two levels that were protected with a Simplex 2120 fire alarm system. A three-level addition was added in August 2004.

“When the college built the addition, they added to the existing fire system,” Dougherty says. “SimplexGrinnell upgraded the existing equipment and installed a sprinkler system in the third-level addition.”

There are both smoke and heat detectors in some areas, while other areas only contain heat detectors. “It was not practical to put smoke detectors in the basketball court area due to the size of the facility,” Dougherty says. “The installers put in five sets of beam detectors instead, including a long hallway between the court and the field house.”

Another recent challenge involved the Muhlenberg College chapel, a stone and concrete building constructed in 1929. Because it is such an old building, special accommodations were made to install the fire alarm and security systems. Installers used as little wire and exposed molding as possible. Where there was woodwork, they ran wire above the wood. They drilled through some of the stone, but wherever possible, they hid wiring in the creases between the stones, concealing it with a matching color cement caulk. In the main sanctuary, two beam detectors were used to minimize the number of smoke detectors in that area.

“I'm impressed with how they managed to cover the wire,” Dougherty says. “It wasn't easy, but they understood that we wanted to maintain the integrity of the architecture.”

Electronic access control

To strengthen life-safety and property protection, the college also wanted an electronic access system. “If a student, vendor or employee would lose or misplace a set of keys, the college might have to re-key every door on campus,” Kurzeja says. “That's when our EAS became a vital component for the added campus security. It also allowed the college to better control accessibility.”

The college's old system was a DOS-based system that had met its expansion limitations. SimplexGrinnell migrated its older Simplex system to a new technology platform that covers student housing and the academic buildings. All of the original controllers were then interfaced to the new system. The legacy controllers are connected via fiber optics. Over time, these controllers were upgraded to intelligent controllers that communicate on the college's Ethernet network via Cat-5 cabling.

The SimplexGrinnell EAS includes nearly 100 Prox Pro and Prox Pro II readers from HID Corp., Irvine, Calif., installed throughout the campus. The system supports about 2,000 dual-technology photo ID cards, using proximity technology for entry and magstripe technology for library card and cafeteria services. Keypad code entry and motion sensors have been installed to provide a higher level of protection for areas on campus where critical information, data and equipment are stored.

The Life Sports Center is protected by three pan/tilt/zoom and three fixed color cameras from Bosch Security Systems, Lancaster, Pa., along with six access-controlled doors, which give the college more control over who uses the sports facility. “There were a lot of non-students and non-employees who were not paying to use the facility, so with the new equipment, the school has opened up yearly memberships to alumni and donors to use the center as well,” Kurzeja says.

The benefits of the integrated system

The campus has seen a reduction in false pull station alarms and theft since the installation of the integrated fire and security system. “We had some minor problems in the past, and we caught a couple of students,” Dougherty says. “They were suspended for one year, fined $300 by the institution and arrested by the city. The punishment alone is a deterrent.”

In one case, an offending student was identified because he swiped his access card to enter the facility and went straight to the pull box and pulled the alarm.

There are still some cases of nuisance alarms, but most result from steam coming from the showers in the M.I.L.E. house area or from students who have not yet learned how to microwave popcorn, Dougherty says.

To this point, the use of CCTV on campus is minimal, with 20 cameras installed. They are mainly used as recording devices for reviewing data when needed, but Dougherty has noted a substantial decrease in vehicular break-ins in the school's parking lots since the cameras were installed.

The integrated life-safety system includes asset protection capability that was put in place to help safeguard the valuable LCD projectors located in most classrooms. The school previously had seven LCD projectors stolen — at a value of more than $17,000 — before the asset protection solution was implemented. Since then, there have been no further thefts, since this equipment is now protected through an alarm system that uses the fire system software to notify the Campus Safety office of any tampering. Additionally, emergency panic alarms were added to a designated office area. In the event of an emergency, employees can notify the Campus Safety office by pushing a button that sends an alarm signal to the fire alarm system.

The bottom line is that the integrated system allows the college to address both safety and security issues at the same time, and it can be monitored on a central location 24 hours a day, Dougherty says.

“It enhances our patrol functions in that it is like having extra eyes and ears around campus to monitor what is happening in the various facilities,” Dougherty says. “Our association with SimplexGrinnell allows us to have a consistency and reliability in the equipment they are providing and in the response for service and/or repair.”

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Bosch Security Systems	40
HID Corp.	41
SimplexGrinnell	42

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