PROJECT
PROFILES

Honeywell Geismar Homeland Security Project

This project won a 2006 ABC National Eagle Award for Excellence In Construction and an ABC Bayou Chapter Award of Excellence.

Geismar, Louisiana - In August of 2004, Industrial Specialty Contractors (ISC) mobilized a hand-picked team of highly trained associates for a job unlike any it had done before – a $1,200,000 lump-sum contract with Honeywell Process Solutions for installation of the most technologically advanced security system ever deployed at a North American chemical plant. When this unique electrical/instrumentation project was complete in March of 2005, ISC’s associates had supplied 95% of the labor, investing 23,317 man-hours, including overtime, in just 25 weeks. Most important of all, they’d done so with zero lost-time accidents, zero recordables, zero first-aid incidents, and zero near misses.

Systems installed by ISC include data network infrastructure and defenses, perimeter security, threat detection, access control, and asset and hazardous-material tracking systems. The result is a milestone in chemical plant security likely to be emulated for years to come, a robust system integrating process control in new ways to deliver substantial increases in plant efficiency, safety and security.

ISC’s work was done at Honeywell Specialty Chemicals’ Geismar plant on the Mississippi River just 20 miles southeast of Louisiana’s capitol in Baton Rouge. Built in 1967, the plant occupies 240 acres in a 1,900-acre compound it shares with a Williams ethylene facility and a PCS Nitrogen plant.

ISC’s work included a dockside radar installation that monitors river traffic and automatically prioritizes waterborne targets day or night, regardless of visibility, as well as the communications support infrastructure that delivers real-time information to security personnel and plant operators. Security inside the plant is no less sophisticated, right down to the hand-geometry readers integrated with the access-control panels that ISC built and installed throughout the site.

Perimeter security systems installed by ISC include 6,800 ft. of fence-line intrusion detector cable, microwave intrusion-detection equipment, 84 card readers, infrared sensors, smoke and fire detectors and more than 50 pan-tilt-zoom video cameras that continuously scan the plant’s interior and surroundings for hazards and threats. A high-resolution “video wall” installed by ISC allows security and process control personnel to monitor the entire system in real time.

Most of this hardware communicates over a 36,000 ft. optical fiber backbone routed through existing cable tray in a 9,000-foot, ISC-built inner duct connecting the plant’s control room, guard house, administration building and dock. A number of the closed circuit TV cameras communicate via wireless technology that also was installed by ISC.

The finished project is a “world-class” security system, one of the most sophisticated security systems ever installed in a chemical manufacturing operation.