Water Authority Connects With Digital Video

Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM

The South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority in New Haven supplies water to approximately 400,000 residents in 12 cities and towns in and around New Haven. Its 15 reservoirs, eight treatment plants, 28 pumping stations, 29 storage tanks and more than 1,500 miles of water mains supply an average of 55 million gallons of water to residences and businesses in the region every day.

“Being in the industry we're in, we can't afford to have the security system lock up over the weekend and not know about it,” says Tony Delvecchio, the authority's senior supervisor of distribution, cross connections and construction.

The authority owns 24,000 acres of land, including eight recreation areas and a managed forest, and has its own small police force. When managers came to the conclusion that their existing digital video recorder system was not working out, they went back to the drawing board, and initiated an exhaustive vendor search.

“We wanted something that was very stable — something running on a Windows 2000 or Linux operating system,” Delvecchio says.

The authority chose DVRs from March Networks, Ottawa, Ontario, and the installation was performed by local Mitel Networks reseller Omni Communications. The authority purchased two March Networks DVRs last December and plans to buy another three units in the next year. “It was just a matter of plugging in the cameras, naming them and setting up the event recording,” Delvecchio says of the installation process. “It took me longer to find the correct length of cable to hook up the DVR than it took to actually configure it.”

“We've probably cut the time it takes to review incidents from two to three hours, down to 10 or 15 minutes,” Delvecchio says.

The authority elected to go with two 300Gb external RAID devices, which provide 60 days of storage once an additional 32 cameras are added to the system. The DVRs are set up to record on motion alarm.

Running on a subnet of an existing wide area network (WAN), the DVR system will allow authorized staff to access and view both live and archived video from the authority's main office building and from remote sites.

“With the analog system,” Delvecchio says, “designated staff were trained to review video. Now, anyone with access to the software can do it, freeing up security staff.”

Functionality that allows users to copy and distribute images and video clips as e-mail attachments has come in handy for Delvecchio, as has the ability to burn longer clips to CD-ROM.

“Most organizations that are installing video recording systems now are going digital,” he says. “Everybody we talk to is going digital. It's just so much more efficient.”

The importance of protecting water supplies has received special attention since Sept. 11, but the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority has always taken security seriously.

“Our security staff has done such an excellent job in the past that we didn't have to make many modifications,” Delvecchio says. “The heightened concern about security is an issue for water authorities everywhere, but the impact on us has been minimal.”

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