Airport Protects Employee Parking Lots

Employee safety should not be confined within the walls of a business -- it also should include parking lots, which can be prone to incidents. Recognizing this threat, Petards Inc., a developer of advanced surveillance systems, has supplied its Universal Video Management System (UVMS) in several employee parking lots at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, N.J.

UVMS is being used in four parking lots that are reserved for employees of Continental Airlines, United Airlines, British Airways and the Transportation Security Administration. The lots span 55 acres with space for 8,250 vehicles. To ensure safety of employees going to and from work, protect personal property, prevent unauthorized access to the facility and identify any potential homeland security threats, live video surveillance is conducted 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the parking lots.

The scalable UVMS system allowed the parking lot management company, Cardinal Central Station, to preserve its previous investment in surveillance cameras. One hundred and five cameras are now operating within the four lots, including existing analog devices and newly implemented digital equipment.

The Petards system allows Cardinal Central Station to record all its video content in digital format, even though three of the four parking lots use older analog cameras during the transition to IP. Petards also has installed remote network encoders in the lots served by analog cameras, enabling the video signals to be converted to digital and sent over a landline or wireless network.

“The Petards UVMS has significantly improved our security performance and enabled us to quickly respond to a number of incidents, including a recent car fire in one of our lots,” said Joe Kolakowski, director of Cardinal Central Station. “Not only is the Petards solution one of the easiest to implement and train our employees on, it is incredibly robust and reliable. We are able to view multiple video feeds at once, remotely monitor our facilities, and retrieve and zoom in on recorded content.”

About the Author

Megan Weadock is a communications specialist at Monitronics.

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