Situational awareness: Inside the new World Trade Center

A decade after 9/11, Louis Barani of the new WTC is designing a situational awareness platform that reflects on the past for future protection (includes video and image gallery)

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

September 06, 2011 — CSO —

There is perhaps no image of security more striking than the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. It was the scene of a terrorist bombing in 1993 that killed six people and, ten years ago, the epicenter of an attack that changed the world forever.

The events of September 11, 2001, marked the end of security as we all had known it, and the beginning of an era that now includes intense checks at airports, amplified scrutiny for those who want to travel across borders, a major focus on national security, and more emphasis within organizations on mitigating risk and evaluating how well they are protected. Difficult lessons were learned at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And now, from an office 19 floors above the site, Louis Barani oversees the construction and design of a security system that heeds those lessons and will take the new World Trade Center into the future.

Barani, a naval veteran who has 25 years of government and private-sector experience in security-risk management and critical-infrastructure protection, was brought in to be World Trade Center Security Director after working at the Port Authority's Office of Emergency Management as general manager for security programs. He was charged with bringing together a disparate set of security and building-management systems, as well as the many stakeholders involved in the process of developing security for what is possibly one of the most talked-about redevelopments in the world. When the redesigned and reconstructed site is finally opened, it will comprise five new skyscrapers, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a transportation hub, a retail complex and a performing arts center.

[See an image gallery from the new World Trade Center construction project]

"The conditions on the site are separate and distinct stakeholders and components," says Barani. "The five towers, the memorial and museum, the transportation hub, underground roadway, network, vehicle security center—they all have different security and building-management systems, and all are controlled by their own operations and security command centers. What we needed to accomplish was situational awareness for the entire site to coordinate responses to events that could have a negative impact."

And that is what Barani is now developing. An event- and identity-management system he refers to as a Situational Awareness Platform. The system will overlay security and building-management systems (BMS)—including access control; CCTV; alarm; fire; chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) defense; HVAC; elevator control; and visitor management—and fuse and correlate information from them to create that situational awareness. It will give Barani and his team information about events, conditions and even identities that can be used by law enforcement and fire and life safety crews as needed.

"We had to find a way to generate as much information as possible, fuse it, correlate it and bring it into one location," explained Barani. "We took two products—event management and identity management products from VidSys and Quantum Secure—and developed an integration between them with a single rules-development driver. This way we can correlate information from the event and the identity and have a better situational awareness."

Barani explains that the identity management piece might come into play if, for example, an employee's access card is stolen or lost. If someone steals a card and is trying to get into a critical area, such as a closet containing sensitive assets, a central chiller plant, or a critical electrical area, it will generate a single alarm. But if there are multiple attempts made using that card, it will be flagged by the system because it does not clear a threshold of acceptability.

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