Security details: Delta Scientific’s barriers protect government and diplomatic sites at home and abroad

Posted by on December 31st, 2007 at 12:02am

HARRY Dickinson was working in his machine shop when a client in the drive-in cinema industry came to him with a problem: Kids were driving their cars into the outdoor cinemas through the exits and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping them without posting guards.

In the early 1970s, Dickinson designed and built a spike strip that would puncture the tires of any vehicle going in through the exits. Similar spike strips had been around for decades, but Dickinson standardized the design. Soon banks and savings and loans found out about them and wanted controlled access to their parking lots, too.

Today, those spike strips can be found in parking lots all over the country, accompanied by me warning: “Do Not Back Up–Severe Tire Damage.”

Dickinson went from his success with spike strips to launch Delta Scientific Corp., a business specializing in barriers that fall back and flatten to allow authorized vehicles through, but spring up to block unauthorized ones.

In the 33 years since its founding, Palmdale-based Delta Scientific has emerged as one of the premier barricade companies in the nation; its equipment can be found protecting hundreds of government and diplomatic facilities in the U.S. and abroad, as well as other sites such as nuclear power plants, airports and reservoirs where security is a prime concern. Annual revenues are now in the $30 million to $40 million range.

“We’re in the business of protecting high-value targets from attacking vehicles,” said Dickinson, who is now 80 and gradually handing over business operations to son David.

Delta Scientific makes several types of barricades, including posts called bollards that can be raised or lowered, small portable barriers that cost as tittle as $10,000 per road lane protected, and huge permanent barriers with deep foundations that can exceed $40,000 a lane. Two of the biggest customers are the U.S. military–including air bases in the Unites States and portable barriers that are now being used in Iraq–and the State Department.

Several attacks over the years have tested the performance of Delta Scientific’s barriers, including one in Argentina in 1987; another at the U.S. Embassy in Dares Salaam in Tanzania in 1998; and another in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004.

In the Jeddah attack on the U.S. Consulate, a vehicle rushed through the Delta Scientific barrier as it was down to allow an authorized vehicle to pass. But a second Delta Scientific barrier fight behind the first one stopped the truck, forcing the attackers to free and engage in a firefight with guards. Five guards died, but so did the four attackers, who ultimately were unable to penetrate the building.

Cyclical business

By its very nature, ground security is a boom-bust business, with interest surging after major attacks like bombings of U.S. embassies abroad or Sept. 11. Then, alter a few years, interest wanes–until the next incident.

“The farther away we get from an event, the more security returns toward where it was before,” said Sandra Jones, a security industry consultant based in Cleveland.

Delta Scientific has lived that boombust cycle. Orders and personnel shot up dramatically in the months after Sept. 11–so much so that the company had to lease another facility to make the barriers, and its staff more than doubled to around 450.

One customer that purchased barricades from Delta Scientific after 9/11 was the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, which wanted to safeguard its reservoirs and water treatment facilities from conventional or biological attacks.

“I had our engineering staff look on the Internet and find out what the feds were using to protect their buildings and that’s how we ran across Delta Scientific,” said Jim Yannotta, assistant director of water resources for L.A.’s water and power agency. He said only one other company bid for the project besides Delta.

Yannotta said there were some problems initially getting the controls to work so that the barriers could be integrated into the DWP security system. There were also some glitches in raising and lowering them on a few seconds notice. But since those initial kinks were worked out, the barricades have been up and functioning for nearly five years.

“They are certainly imposing and have been a very good deterrent against any organized force trying to come through,” he said.

New markets, products

Today, Delta’s workforce has shrunk back to 168, and they all have plenty of room to work after the company moved from Santa Clarita last year into a new facility in Palmdale that includes the corporate headquarters.

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