Year
1983
Abstract
Facilities that require outdoor perimeter sensor fields to furnish perimeter penetration alarms can often benefit by the inclusion of manned guard towers in the total security plan. Acquisition and maintenance costs of closed circuit television to provide adequate visual assessment may be too costly and perhaps tower personnel could perform other functions such as monitoring vehicles or personnel in the vicinity of the protected area. Because there appeared to be no uniformity of design features for guard towers being built for nominally identical purposes, a program has been undertaken at Sandia National Laboratories to identify functions and features of towers, and to find a standard design such that security organizations, wishing to build a tower, would not find it necessary to start anew for each application. A tower design using prestressed concrete \"double tees\" has been worked out and reduced to practice that accomplishes many of the desired characteristics of a guard tower at reasonable cost. The prestressed concrete technology is available throughout the CONUS, Canada, Europe, etc. One such design is described and discussed.