Don't Fence Me In

At the outset, let me say that if you think I'm going to get into the politics of border fences, then you're wrong -- very wrong. But from an engineering perspective, building Berlin Wall like fences along the southwestern border of the U.S. is, well, challenging -- enough so that the process has even spawned its own R&D arm, the "Fence Lab." The Fence Lab is a program created by Secure Borders Initiative that works with universities and national labs to devise and test various types of fence and barriers.

Under the direction of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, eight different types of fences have been developed and tested. Putting aside rusty barbed-wire and the like, these fences can be generally categorized as high-tech "virtual fences" and low-tech "brute-force fences." As you probably suspect, the Boeing-built virtual fences are towers -- nine of them for now, each 98-feet tall and stretching across 28 miles of desert (hence the name "Project 28"), and loaded with radar, sensors, and cameras.

If they work, plans call for as many as 1,800 of the towers going nearly 400 miles. Of course, "if" is the operative word here. Acceptance testing was supposed to commence in June, but has been delayed until October.

That's the high-tech approach to fence building. As for the low-tech approach, engineers at Sandia National Labs are testing and evaluating other types of fencing. Now here's the difference between high-tech software testing, and low-tech hardware testing. For the former, if you break some code, all you do is figure out what is broken, then fix it with some new code. And move on. For that latter, all you need are lots of vehicles.

And apparently Sandia Labs have lots of vehicles to test because since last April, they've been crash testsing them to evaluate how the fences will look and perform. The tests stem from the government’s commitment to deploy hundreds of miles of fencing along high-traffic, high-risk stretches of the border. And you thought that Sandia was just a national "nuclear" lab.

There's something appealing about the brute-force approach to fence testing. Simulations are cool. Sensors are fun. But crash testing vehicles into concrete walls has the appeal of, say, professional football on a Sunday afternoon. High-tech fences, on the other hands, are more like ballet. Whatever the analogy, it turns out that Sandia's brute-force tests were well received.

"[Customs and Border Patrol] was delighted with our work," said Mark McAllaster, a member of Sandia’s Active Response and Denial Department. He says CBP was particularly impressed with the team’s ability to pull together all the project elements -- materials procurement, fence installations, vehicle purchases, and the crash tests themselves." See it just isn't me who appreciates a good crash test.

But McAllaster was quick to point out that "Sandia doesn’t merely analyze fence barriers. Our capabilities are truly state of the art and encompass the full spectrum of physical security, including intrusion detection alarm assessment technologies, performance testing, technology evaluation, vulnerability assessment, design, development, installation, and training."

Now doesn't that sound like engineering to you?

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:30 PM  Permalink