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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Border Protection

Delta Scientific Corp. is finishing the first phase of a $5 million contract to provide guard booths and security barriers for use on the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro, which serves an estimated 60 million people annually. A project with the size and scope of the San Ysidro border doesn’t come around often, even for the Palmdale-based company, which makes security products for global customers that include military bases, embassies, office parks and gated residential communities. The company will deliver a total of 50 booths for the border project over the next year. “The logistics are significant and very different from anything else we do,” said Jeremy Andrews, the company’s project manager and salesman for high security systems. “To come up with 50 booths is a rarity and comes once every five years.” The first phase of the project consists of manufacturing and installing 14 booths for seven lanes at the crossing. Eight booths already have been installed and the final six are slated to be complete next month. Advanced Access Controls, a Sherman Oaks firm, is installing the booths. Despite the complexities, company officials say the project has offered Delta Scientific a chance to show off its engineering talents and ability to innovate to meet the needs of its clients — qualities that have served the company well in its 38-year history. Just shy of 13 feet tall, the booths have bullet-proof material surrounding the area where the border guards stand. They also employ devices to provide fresh air and a self-contained heating and cooling system that uses water instead of forced air. “We had to fit as much as we could into the booth within certain size limitations,” Andrews said. Delta Scientific has deployed more than 20,000 security barriers, gates, traffic controllers and guard booths around the world. In addition to the Palmdale headquarters and manufacturing facility, the company has support offices in Virginia and England. It employs 150 workers. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a six-fold increase in orders for security barriers, and the company added two shifts to meet that demand. The work has settled down since then, but the company still has an annual growth rate of 6 to 10 percent, said David Dickinson, the senior vice president and a co-founder along with his father, Harry Dickinson. Delta Scientific worked for about 18 months designing the booths in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Custom design-build work makes up about 8 percent of Delta Scientific’s business, and many of the barrier and protective systems the company makes today started out as custom jobs, Dickinson said. “Each time we make a new generation, we look at the limitations and try to make it into a broader application,” he said. For example, Delta also did a custom booth project that served two subway lines of the Metro in Washington, D.C. That was a complex job, too, Dickinson said, noting the octagonal booths were shipped in eight pieces to the stations aboard Metro trains. Advanced Access Controls has installed Delta Scientific barriers and booths since its founding in 1998. The San Ysidro project is different because of the duct work that connects the booths to supply fresh air, power and data, said President Dan Erickson. “It is fun running into something that you have not run into before,” he said. Advanced Access uses a 90-ton crane to lift the 15,000-pound booths into place. The work has been done at night so as not to interfere with the sub-contractors working on other parts of the modernization project, Erickson said. The new guard booths and security barriers are part of a larger project to modernize the San Ysidro crossing with new primary and secondary inspection areas, administration building, pedestrian building, and other support structures. A modernized crossing will improve wait times at the border, which serves 60 million people annually, according to a 2006 study by the San Diego Association of Governments and the California Department of Transportation. Congestion leading to long wait times for vehicles to cross inhibits cross-border economic investment opportunities, the study said. It takes about six weeks to build a booth, and as the work crews gain more experience that time should be reduced to about one a week, Andrews said. He said the company anticipates getting more work with the guard booths as Customs and Border Protection renovates other border crossings. “They are trying to standardize all the borders so when guards go from one location to the next it is all interchangeable for them,” Andrews said.

Mark Madler
Mark Madler
Mark R. Madler covers aviation & aerospace, manufacturing, technology, automotive & transportation, media & entertainment and the Antelope Valley. He joined the company in February 2006. Madler previously worked as a reporter for the Burbank Leader. Before that, he was a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and several daily newspapers in the suburban Chicago area. He has a bachelor’s of science degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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