Atlantic City Hilton's do-it yourself upgrade

May 1, 1997 12:00 PM, By RICHARD L. MOUREY

When the security system at the Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort needed modernizing, it had to be done quickly, and security on the casino floor could not be compromised. Outside contractors estimated two weeks to do the job, but the casino's technical staff did it themselves in one and a half days. Selecting a system

The existing security system was more than 15 years old and could not handle the growth at the casino. A modern alarm and access control system was needed - one that could meet current needs and accommodate expansion well into the future. This scenario is typical of what drives much of the growth in the security industry today. Many systems installed years ago simply cannot hack today's requirements, let alone future growth.

Security at the Hilton focuses on the slot machines and tables in the 58,124-square-foot casino. But it also includes alarm security for the retail shops and access control for the executive offices on the ninth floor, a warehouse a block away and two parking lots. A 300-room addition to the hotel already under construction added to the system requirements.

Tom Davis, surveillance technical manager at the Hilton, says the technical staff did everything it could to make the old system meet today's needs. We tweaked and twitched and even added a laptop to extend its life, but it was not enough. We were forced to extend security staffing to provide the high level of protection we need and want for our customers.

A new system was clearly needed, but there was a caveat: The system had to work with the existing wiring. Davis estimates there are more than 20,000 linear feet of twisted pair wiring in the casino. To replace it would have cost money and time. Davis and his people did not have the time.

An outside contractor estimated two weeks to do the job. This was unacceptable to us and would have concerned the Casino Control Commission and the State Police enforcement personnel, both of whom have offices down the hall from our security office, Davis says. Director of Security John Malone kept the state people fully informed of our plans and how we expected to do the changeover.

Ultimately, a system by Guardall North America, the Chubb Security unit, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was selected. The integrator was Meadowlands Electronics of Point Pleasant, N.J., a supplier of security equipment to casinos nationwide. When all was said and done, we only pulled five new wires for the entire facility, Davis says.

Surveillance capabilities The system's main console and printer are in security supervisor Charlie Ford's office in the casino. The old system had seven multiplexer panels providing up to 116 alarm points. The Guardall PRISM+ system has six panels providing up to 192 alarm points. Three panels handle the casino alarm system. Three others handle alarms for the hotel and retail stores and eight Wiegand card readers in the executive offices and warehouse. Proximity readers from HID, Hamden, Conn., are to be installed in the parking lots. The remote sites are tied into the system through a dedicated phone line.

In the casino, an alarm point is located in every pit and at all the cash windows. When an alarm is activated, the signal goes to the security podium where the appropriate action is taken. The alarm is repeated to the central controller in the security office and can be displayed on a monitor in the CCTV surveillance room.

The surveillance room houses more than a dozen screens on which surveillance staff monitor action on the casino floor. Every table, row of slot machines, cage and coin area is taped and monitored by pan-and-tilt CCTV cameras from Sensormatic and fixed cameras from Sony.

Though the staff watches tables on a selective basis, all cameras are taped 24 hours a day, so they can focus on an area if a problem arises.

Dennis O'Brien, director of surveillance, notes the surveillance room had recently been expanded to permit a new American Dynamics CCTV system, additional VCRs, more monitoring stations and added room for maintenance.

Though the alarm and access control system is not integrated with the monitoring operation, the staff is considering the integration for the future. Alarm and access control capabilities

The alarm system uses six multiplexers. Each provides 32 supervised input monitoring points and 10 output control relays, making 192 monitoring points and 60 output relays available.

As noted earlier, the system uses 167 of the 192 available alarm points, leaving room for expansion without adding multiplexers. Two Wiegand readers handle access control for the front and rear entrances of the executive offices. They are controlled by the Guardall PRISM+ T2K two-door controller. Davis says the Wiegand readers were retained because, since being installed in 1985, they have not needed maintenance. The new system uses a Wiegand interface to allow continued use of existing Wiegand cards.

At the warehouse, six doors are protected by Wiegand readers. The new system includes three two-door controller boards that communicate through a card reader multiplexer with a short circuit isolater. Data is transmitted to the host system in the hotel/casino via a dedicated line.

Door locks are primarily electric door strikes and 1,200-pound-hold Maglok magnetic locks from Securitron Magnalock, Sparks, Nev. Exit buttons are used for egress, but Davis plans to install PIR devices to permit people whose hands are full to exit easily.

The Guardall system communicates by a loop but uses bi-directional polling from the central console. If the loop is broken, the central controller will still be able to communicate with all the system components. The central controller is a Pentium PC running the PRISM+ software.

Gary Collins, the technical supervisor on the casino installation, advised Davis to integrate the casino's mantraps into the system in the next year or two. A two-door mantrap is located at the entrance to the change booths. It requires that one door close before the other can be opened.

The system's reporting capabilities include 50 audit log files of 100,000 transactions per log, i.e., 5 million transactions. Logs of card use, entry and exit and number of entries are maintained, as are alarm logs to watch for trouble spots and potential malfunctions.

A do-it-yourself-er The most unusual aspect of the Hilton installation was the in-house ability to make the changeover in just 36 hours. Davis, with Elliott Hawkins, surveillance technician, and Charlie Ford, did the entire changeover with assistance from Collins and the casino's electricians. To a large extent, it was a Ocut-and-try' operation. Davis and Hawkins did preliminary work by marking the circuits they could identify. These were mostly circuits the two men had worked on over the past 10 years. Both had been careful to mark the wires and the locations on the terminal boards.

But many circuits had been installed before Davis and Hawkins came on the scene. Identifying them required good, old-fashioned hard work and some ingenuity. One of them would trip an alarm; the other would test circuits with an Ohmmeter until a change identified the circuit. Similar procedures were used for protected doors in the casino and to identify various alarm circuits in the hotel, retail shops and executive areas. In a few cases, the old system could be used, but it was not reliable enough to track all circuits. It was just plain overloaded.

Even so, some circuits remained a mystery. Collins says that once an alarm was triggered by one of the others on the floor, it could be identified and entered into the system through the control console.

Davis has high praise for the casino electricians for aiding in the changeover. It was extremely important that security on the casino floor and at the cashier cages not be compromised. If the alarm system was down for any period of time, the added security staff costs could have mounted significantly, he says. When we looked at the situation it was clear we had to try to do the installation and changeover ourselves.

Now, we have a good, user-friendly system in place that should take care of our security needs for a long time into the future.

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