I recently visited a facility where security is their top priority.  Many of the doors are set to sound an alarm if they are left open for more than 6 seconds.  This presents a challenge when carts are being moved through the opening, because the doors need to stay open long enough for the carts, but need to close before the 6-second mark.  There are 10,000 employees on-site during a typical day, and leaving a door unsecure / not locked or latched can result in termination of their jobs.  Many of the doors are fire doors, which adds some extra complexity to the issue.  Almost all of the doors have access-control.

I stood at several of these openings and watched the employees attempt to make the doors function as needed.  A guy on a cart came along and jumped off the cart, flung the door open, jumped back on the cart and drove it through, hitting the door with the cart as he went.  Then he jumped off the cart and forced the door closed.

Have you ever dealt with a similar situation?  What would you do?

Update:  To answer a few of the questions that were left in the comments…the doors in these photos have a prox reader, keypad, and biometric reader.  The time limit on having the door open (6 seconds or 15 seconds for most of these openings) is not something that is within the facilities department’s control.  There are some cameras in the facility, but they do not monitor each door with cameras because it would be cost-prohibitive to monitor all of them.

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