Columbus Zoo to boost security
POWELL, Ohio (WCMH) — If you’ve stopped by the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium recently, you may have noticed a lot of construction out front.
The zoo is adding another safety measure, planning to have it in effect by late summer.
It’s a system called EVOLV and it’s one the zoo’s director of safety and security shares has been used by them before. Zoo officials have had time to play around with the system and find a way to make it work for the zoo’s safety measures.
This is something that a security research group, IPVM, said is important. EVOLV is a subject of its research.
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An expert at IPVM started looking into EVOLV years ago. He shared that the EVOLV system works on a sliding scale of sensitivity. IVPM said that on one end, it is security and on the other is convenience.
“If you took a regular metal detector, you can just think about it this way, and you reduced the sensitivity, you would do that so that it wouldn’t always go off on phones and keys, but you are also in a situation where it might miss weapons,” IPVM Director of Government Research Conor Healy said.
The zoo worked with the EVOLV at Zoombezi Bay to find the right setting and plans to do the same for the zoo. For the water park, it is set to a middle-level sensitivity.
“Guests safety is high priority for us, it definitely is for me,” Columbus Zoo Director of Safety and Security Steven Langton said. “So any extra layer we can add to our security operations just make sense from our perspective.”
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EVOLV’s sensitivity ranges from A through G.
“Zoombezi Bay runs on a ‘D’ setting because there’s a lot of things we get over there, sunglass cases, and umbrellas and things like that, that routinely alarm on that system,” Langton said.
He said the zoo sees more strollers and wagons than the waterpark, so that will change the approach taken at its entrances.
“We’ll start it off probably pretty sensitive, and then play with it and adjust it from there to where we get a good mix of, you know, accurate alarms, and then maybe things we’re not trying to get and kind of see where we’re at somewhere in the middle,” Langton said.
There will be two systems with four lanes for the zoo side. Someone walks through and if they have a suspicious object, a screen shows where it is.
“We don’t want that kind of that TSA feeling, where you have to take your belt and shoes off and empty out your pockets,” Langton said. “We want people to come in, not realize they’re walking through this system, come through it, come to the main gate, enjoy their day.”
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Langton said all zoo staff will go through training at Zoombezi Bay before the system opens so if something does set off the alarm, they know what to do.
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