By Ana María Restrepo Security at airports is one of the most important factors for the administrations of these places, so that both internal and external protection systems are installed and improved day by day.
As of 2006, there were approximately 49,024 airports in the world, a high number that not only implies a large traffic of aircraft and merchandise but also of people, factors that must be protected as it happens.
Most of these airports have electronic security solutions that allow detecting metals, flammable liquids, sharp sharp objects; in addition to having X-rays, CCTV, access controls and security personnel. However, some airports do not have highly efficient fire detection systems that allow the location of the fire outbreak and its rapid action.
10 years ago, on February 13, 1998, the Santos Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro caught fire at 1:30 in the morning due to a thermoelectric failure. According to the relevant authorities, the fire spread quickly due to the structure of the buildings, without walls and with many divisions, in addition, the roofs of combustible material facilitated the expansion of the fire, which was intense and very prolonged. The fire, aided by the wind, reached in about four hours the entire extension of the areas of the upper floors. The severity of this in the structures of those floors had an estimated total duration of about eight hours.
One of the factors that influenced the fire to spread quickly was that the building had no fire doors, compartments, protected scales, fire alarms or sprinkler system.
Many cases like this have occurred all over the world, which is why day by day in air terminals they install fire safety systems. At Lambert-St. Airport Louis, one of the busiest airports in the United States, placed digital solutions that would allow them to respond to the demands in the event of a fire outbreak and could be integrated with the previous ones.
Also at the Rafael Nuñez Airport in Cartagena, the first tourist city in Colombia, a fire detection system was installed with hundreds of devices located throughout the place which will be integrated with the CCTV of the airport.
New terminal, new technology
Mexico City's Benito Juarez International Airport is among the fifty largest and most congested airports in the world with a total of 24,593,356 passengers as of June 2006; due to the high demand of travelers, on November 15 of last year the new Terminal 2 came into operation which seeks to increase the capacity of attention to 32 million passengers annually. Although the operations of this terminal began in November, it was formally inaugurated on March 26, 2008 by the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.
From the new terminal 2, which communicates with terminal 1 through an interterminal train (Aerotren), which has a route of 3 km, Aeromar and Delta Airlines flights, Aeromexico, Copa, Lan and Continental Airlines are made.
The building, erected as a double-level system of vehicular access, one for arrivals and one for departures, has four documentation areas where operations of several airlines can be carried out, also divides national operations from international ones, each one destined to a corridor of boarding rooms and telescopic corridors.
Due to the novelty of the terminal, owned by the federal government, which seeks to provide a better service to the user public and the improvement in the country's communication routes, the implementation of a fire detection system was established to provide protection to passengers and workers of the place, in addition to the new facilities.
Fire prevention
The installed system of the Securiton brand covers the entire enclosure and is made up of an intelligent system, with intelligent detectors and special systems for early detection, smoke aspiration, linear infrared detection of heat and smoke and linear temperature detection, according to Engineer Carlos Tovilla, operations manager for Mexico at Securiton. "All areas of the new Terminal 2 were protected, such as the buildings called South Finger, North Finger, Terminal building, service building, as well as the Aerotrén stations that connect Terminal 1 with the new Terminal 2," he adds.
These spaces include waiting rooms, offices, migration, reel, bus station, concession section and fast food area, remote transmission rooms (CTR), sub-stations and covered parking. The security conditions, from any sub sector that is looked at, whether CCTV, access controls and fires, raise different implementations that are necessary according to the situations of insecurity that arise in some places, cities or companies. In Mexico, many cities have urban CCTV systems, which support police work and provide protection to citizens. Likewise, thousands of companies implement access controls to protect their facilities and their employees, and airports install security solutions to prevent attacks, monitor corridors, control the entry of prohibited devices and elements, as well as to prevent fires or conflagrations.
The installation of Securiton's fire detection system was determined by the federal decentralized agency Airports and Auxiliary Services (ASA), rector of the national development plan for National Airports, which decided to implement the latest technology thus giving the installation of the most sophisticated security systems. However, there have been no changes to security legislation in Mexico; Tovilla comments that work has been done on the creation of Mexican standards, since to date and as in many places in Latin America, there is no internal regulation, and in the best of cases international regulations are applied. "This has led to a better technification in the implementation of security systems at the discretion of the designer-specifier and the end user."
Personalized security
With Terminal 2 being a new construction, the fire system is completely new, consisting of the wide range of smart technology. This system offers as a benefit to the end user that it is a decentralized solution with modular growth facility.
Through the SecuriPro system, 10 central MCU control units were implemented, which are linked via SecuriLAN, and are supervised to a control panel located in the monitoring center, each of the MCUs has a SecuriLine that links each of the devices, intelligent smoke and fire detector, linear temperature detector (ADW 511), smoke suction detection (ASD 516), infrared smoke and temperature detector (Ardea), as well as the activation of audiovisual warning systems.
The Aerotrén's fire system consists of two central MCU control units, which are linked through the implementation of fiber optics.
Securiton's solution was integrated with the security system through OPC protocol, in which it interacts with access control, CCTV and automation systems.
Advantages for Terminal 2
"Being an intelligent system, we can accurately locate the site where the fire outbreak is being generated, in such a way we can act immediately, avoiding the loss of human lives and reducing material destruction and false alarms to the minimum possible," explains the operations manager for Mexico of Securiton.
This system aims at early detection, as well as preventing the spread of a fire within the enclosure. As Tovilla explains, part of the integration of the system is the activation and focus of security cameras in the area, the activation and / or stop of escalators, elevators, ventilation system, in combination with audiovisual alerts (sirens and strobes), focused on an orderly evacuation to security zones, and the correct application of the various actions designed by the civil protection area.
At the time of implementing the system there were some difficulties related to the time that was given for the installation of the system. According to what Tovilla said, "this is an important social work politically speaking, at the same time that the system was installed it was still in civil works and finishes, which led us to the loss and mistreatment of a large number of devices, as well as when performing the operation tests, a high number of detectors already required maintenance after being installed for more than a year in working conditions."
As expressed by the installation company of the system, this technology was implemented because, being this an airport and a work of fundamental importance for being the most important in the country, in addition to seeking to be at first world infrastructure levels, it was determined to have the latest technology in all operation and control systems, since the Securiton fire detection system covered the high standards of quality, operation and benefits granted to the end user.
Satisfaction on the ground and in the air
Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, airport security has advanced by leaps and bounds. The almost 50,000 airports in the world have systems, as we mentioned, that protect both employees, passengers and facilities, however, conflagrations are rarely taken into account as agents that generate security and protection problems, as happened in 1998 in Sao Paulo. Therefore, the implementation and correct use of fire systems can save lives both on the ground and in the air.
The operation of the fire solution of Terminal 2 of benito Juaréz International Airport is fully measured and established from its installation. The system has four possible states: normal operation, failure of some device, alarm activation, pre-alarm and maintenance warning.
The control panel when receiving any signal from the devices, whether malfunction or failure, activation or alarm, pre-alarm or maintenance, and sabotage attempts, activate the audiovisual signals arranged for this purpose, guaranteeing the correct functioning of the same.
Although this security system is not ready to catch delinquents, it has allowed to react to the possible situations of conflagration that have arisen. "In the testing stage of the Aerotrén, two fire alarms were detected in the terminals, the system acted in accordance with the stipulations of the protocol, and the Aerotrén stopped its march and moved to the safe site, and did not continue its journey until it had reactivated the system in normal operating conditions," explained Carlos Tovilla.
