Fire Safety Network Takes Off

Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM

The nearly 250-square-mile Spaceport the public thinks of as Cape Canaveral is actually occupied by two separate, though related, groups of users. They are the Kennedy Space Center, with NASA's Space Shuttle/Space Station operation on the north and west side of the Banana River, and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where the Air Force tests and launches the Atlas, Titan, Delta and two new generations of rockets, on the east and south. In enterprises so critical to the nation and where huge quantities of volatile rocket fuels are routinely stored and handled, fire protection and life safety are supremely important.

The Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station offer a unique situation for a fire safety network. The network must monitor and manage a geographic area the size of a city or county, comprising hundreds of buildings with individual fire alarm protection. It must also be able to monitor fire alarms and evacuation orders, interface with and activate suppression systems and dispatch firefighters quickly, efficiently and safely.

Beyond protecting the space program and rockets, the bottom line is the safety of the more than 24,000 people working on-site, often in hazardous environments. Keeping them safe is essential, and the speed of response is the most critical function of the fire alarm network.

Formed in 1998, Space Gateway Support (SGS) LLC, Herndon, Va., operates the Joint Base Operation Support Contract, which is the pioneering achievement for both Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. As operation and maintenance engineers, SGS oversees day-to-day operations, maintenance, and many installations and projects, including those that deal with fire and security.

Historically, copper-based electronic networks were limited by distance. Until 2002, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center maintained separate — and separately redundant — fire safety monitoring systems. As Wide Area Networks (WANs) for fire alarms came into the picture, NASA and the Air Force became the driving forces behind the creation of a networked system with backup computers at several locations.

Distance is no longer an issue with a site-wide NCC-WAN fire system engineered, supplied and installed by the Fire Safety division of Siemens Building Technologies Inc., Florham Park, N.J., through its Orlando, Fla. office and Port Canaveral satellite office. The new WAN links the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center through 40 miles of communication line around the loop, achieving interactive bi-directional communication including meeting fire codes and communicating supervisory signals for hundreds of fire control panels.

The bottom line: Networked fire alarm computers enable operators to monitor more than 100 individual fire alarm panels from four locations.

The Air Force and NASA, Space Gateway Support engineers, the Siemens design engineering group and technicians in the local Siemens offices all worked in close partnership on the project. For example, suggestions by the SGS software development group were carefully considered, and many were eventually incorporated in the WAN design. The project took four years — from concept to completion.

A prime directive from the Launch Base Support Contractor is that there must never be any single point of failure. Every part of the WAN is 100 percent redundant, including Style-7 wiring, fail-over capabilities on the computers, and duplicate HUB communication modules.

The XY building has a primary and a secondary rack of hubs. The control panels go into that primary and secondary HUB bank and, in return, are connected to the NCC computers. The computers take the information from the HUBs and transmit it to all other locations around Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral.

There are 19 primary HUBs and 19 secondary HUBs in the XY building. The HNET network and the XNET network start there, sending MXL signals to the primary PC in the CSC building, which are transmitted back into the XY building to Hangar I for display, to the VABR and through it to IP10 for display.

For the Space Center, the HUBs are the CDSC building and the VABR building, with two separate NCCs backing each other up in 1P10, the Launch Control Center.

Some 98 percent of the WAN is based on existing copper communication lines, with a new, 5- to 6-mile fiber run and new fiber-optic components added. The computers are now in place and communicating in the network. The next phase will be to cut over all existing fire alarm panels, including about 60 Siemens MXL and MXL-IQ panels, to the network.

With four NCCs in place, the question is which takes precedence in the monitoring activity. Before the WAN was completed, the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's CXL was monitored at LCC and CSC and hangar centers, and the Space Center monitored its panels at the LCC. Now that the WAN is up, the prime monitoring duty for both entities has been moved over to the LCC, with the CSC as the first backup during a launch, or if any problem occurs at the LCC.

The Fire Safety division of Siemens Building Technologies has another installed WAN site at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., and more sites pending at Vandenburg AFB, Princeton University and the AOL campus in the Dulles area.

For the Record

ABOUT THE COMPANIES

For information, circle the Reader Service number (listed below) or visit securitysolutions.com

Siemens Building Technologies	44
Space Gateway Support (SGC) LLC	45

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue