Specialist CCTV with intruder detection systems has installed at the tallest building in the European Union after Greenpeace protesters climbed to the summit.
Six activists, all of them women, scaled the iconic Shard in London and unfurled a flag with ‘Save the Arctic’ emblazoned upon it to protest against plans to drill in the Arctic by the oil company Shell.
The Prime Minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, inaugurated the 95-storey building on 6 July 2012 in a ceremony attended by HRH Prince Andrew The Duke of York.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, officially opened the View from the Shard viewing platform on 1 February 2013.
Following the Greenpeace stunt, the management company for the owner Sellar Property Group and the State of Qatar decided to enhance the on-site security system with the latest state-of-the-art CCTV.
They appointed installer Unique Security, and together evaluated leading products on the market. Zaun’s EyeLynx SharpView was selected on the basis of performance, quality and its focus on reliability.
Its rapid deployment system, Pharos, was installed together with wireless PIRs from Luminite to further secure the perimeter and the main escalators to London Bridge Station.
EyeLynx provided a back-up SharpView NVR for critical cameras in time for a Royal visit from Her Majesty the Queen and HRH Prince Phillip.
This unit worked seamlessly with the installed Pharos cameras using SharpView VMS and demonstrated to the management team how the security could be drastically improved by recording in High Definition quality and retaining video for at least 30 days for all the building’s CCTV cameras.
The complete CCTV system was subsequently changed over to SharpView in January 2014, with over 200 cameras recording to ten SharpView Corporate NVRs incorporating over 200 Tb of storage, while four SharpView Manager Workstations allow the security team to manage and control the entire security system on desktop monitors and a 16 ft video wall in the Control Room.
Security for gas distribution network
One of the UK’s largest gas distributors has specified prison-style double skin steel mesh and special fence toppings to secure its gas distribution network across the north of England.
The business has turned to the Zaun Group and, specifically, its HiSec DualSkin and Flexible Steel Topping (FST) products.
The distributor delivers gas to 2.7 million homes and businesses and around 6.7 million individuals in the North East, northern Cumbria and much of Yorkshire through a vast network of 37,000 km of gas pipes – enough to stretch from Leeds to Sydney, Australia and back again, in fact.
During periods of peak demand, the network transports four times as much energy as the electricity networks to large cities such as Newcastle, Sunderland, Leeds, York, Hull and Bradford and beautiful rural areas including North Yorkshire and Cumbria.
Zaun’s HiSec DualSkin has been specifically designed for sites that need a more secure solution and features two layers of the traditional HiSec 358 welded mesh with 76.2 mm x 12.7 mm open mesh sections.
These double-skin 358 panels are welded together with the secondary panel turned 90 degrees to make a very tight 12.7 mm x 12.7 mm mesh configuration which is difficult to cut and almost impossible to climb.
The tiny apertures eliminate foot and finger holds for people trying to climb the fence or gain access to the site, prevent objects being passed through and are highly resistant against the use of hand or power cutting tools.
HiSec DualSkin conforms to BS 1722 Part 14 Category 4 and has been extensively used in prisons and by the Ministry of Defence to protect high security assets.
The FST topping system that tops the fence is fully-tested for use in UK high security prisons. At the heart of FST is a steel mesh arch, curved back over the top of a steel fence and fixed to a flexible steel bracket that’s designed to move when people try to climb it.
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