Case Studies

VMS in port

by Mark Rowe

A case study of IP video management software (VMS) in use by Faxaports, The Associated Icelandic Ports, for security, handling cargo and securing ships against immigrant stowaways.

Faxaports include Iceland’s main ports for export and import, moving thousands of containers annually to and from international destinations. Most goods imported to the country pass through Faxaports’ harbors, and the number of ships are increasing every year.

With the growing traffic volume comes a need to monitor the harbors to avoid accidents when loading and unloading the containers from the ships, and to deal with the growing problem of illegal immigrants using Iceland as a gateway to the United States.

A Milestone Systems Partner, Security Center, installed Milestone XProtect Enterprise VMS. This manages a mix of 105 Sony, Vivotek and Hikvision cameras that are installed at all Faxaports’ harbors for security.

Security officers now have a full overview of the harbor premises and can monitor the handling of cargo to step in if something is about to go wrong. The guards that are out inspecting the harbors can check up on other areas using the Milestones Mobile client. This also provides the unique remote Video Push feature to send video from the cameras on their mobile devices to the central station, from locations where there may not otherwise be a camera. This gives the security personnel an extended overview of the harbors regardless of their own location. Hallur Árnason, Port Security Officer at Faxaports, says: “We are using our time much more efficiently after installing Milestone XProtect video management software. We have gained 1,000 extra man-hours every year.”

This has allowed security officers to cover more responsibilities. One of these is dealing with the rising number of illegal immigrants in Iceland who are using Faxaports’ harbors to try to get to the United States. With the video management software, Faxaports can better manage illegal immigration.

Hallur Árnason says: “We had an incident where one of our security officers monitoring our harbors identified a person digging a hole to crawl under the fence that secures the area where ships with destination to USA are situated. When the police arrived, they found the individual from the video plus two other individuals trying to get on board a ship heading to the United States. When we had another look at our video footage, we were also able to identify a fourth person hiding in the area. We would never have been able to detect them all if we hadn’t had the Milestone VMS.”

The video system secures the anchored ships against break-ins and vandalism. Hallur Árnason says: “Many of the piers are open to the public so everyone has access to the main harbor areas – vandals along with other people. That creates a need for good surveillance. With the huge number of people passing through the harbors, it can seem like an impossible task to have an overview of everything at the same time – but we made it possible with Milestone.”

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