What do you think of this new Fixed-it Friday product idea? It looks like it would be a little pricey and I’m not sure how a whole class would fit inside, but I give him credit for the engineering. I could use one of these to hide from my kids. 🙂
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I was shown these types of vaults in Iowa and Kansas when training. Primarily used as tornado shelters. The 8 person vault I was shown by a company was retailing for $6500. I’m guessing for a class room size vault to hold 24 people, it would retail for around $15,000-$20,000. If you have 250 classrooms in a district, even at the lower end of the scale, you are around $4,000,000 for the vaults. That does not include shipping and installation. Plus, you will need to enlarge all of your classrooms to hold the shelter and knock out a few walls to get them in. Good intention, bad idea.
I agree – if you were only buying one or two the numbers might work, but considering that some schools are choosing a $50 gadget over a code-compliant lock I don’t see them spending this kind of money for each classroom.
How is that any better than a barricade? It’s only a smaller room for someone to lock themselves into. Plus this is much stronger and much harder for the emergency service men to gain entrance. Hurricane I could see but a classroom, especially a high school, I think would be dumb to have. Plus, would your average 120lbs-140lbs woman teacher (usually elderly in my experience from school) be able to open or close the box without incident or injury?
So sorry about your luck, student 7, student 8, student 9….
As seen on Lori’s site alone, there has been a ton of mental energy and development dollars thrown at this one aspect of school security…from opportunistic entrepreneurs peddling fear to very well meaning individuals. I can’t help but think that if some of these resources could be directed toward overall, holistic school safety and security plans, we’d all be much better off.
Kudos for the design effort. Unrealistic for the spend required on a 500 student school.
We can write the spec, they can VE out items or have a shortfall in budget.
When the spec is followed, they don’t need to then maintain the building.
We can create the security plans, they don’t have to teach them.
We can have every measure possible in place – and it will only take one moment from one person not following protocol.
Yet these are our kids – and so we must press on!
It’s all fun and games until some kid locks himself inside…or worse, the shooter/bad-guy locks himself in the vault with a bunch of kids.
Not much different from a barricade device, except the barricade device is probably easier for the bad guy to install, with a potential for more hostages than would likely get into the vault.
So True. However, my cousin (Colorado Swat) was the second person into the building at Columbine. He went in through a window in one of the classrooms. It wouldn’t matter if a door was barricaded if the swat team is going to break through the glass on the exterior of the classroom. This vault thing, with no windows.. would be a bit harder to get into once locked.
I look and this video and several thoughts occur:1) Yet another snake oil salesman, 2) how tall a room does this take – looks like 12 to 15 feet tall – will that retro fit into an existing room, 3) can it be collapsed with people inside? 4) why does he need to go to Sandy Hook to demonstrate – haven’t those people been through enough?
This could have been a WW post because I am speechless!
The potential for someone to barricade him/herself and some victims inside of this container is the same as that person barricading themselves and their victims inside a classroom with a door barricade device.
Why does everyone think they have to redesign the wheel when there are effective, safe, and relatively affordable door hardware solutions available?
There are many levels of ballistic resistance. As I recall, handguns (used in the demo) are at the lower end, takes less kevlar, than a rifle.
Reminds me of my fold up treadmill, in the corner of the bedroom.
Been setting there unused for a year!!!
It would make more sense to simply make entry/class room/partition (similar to fire doors in a long hallway, to slow the perp down)doors with laminated kevlar in addition to bullet proof panels along hallways (or at least on both sides of the classroom entry door) in a school rather than these breakdown shelters. Teachers would have no physical ability to deploy these timely in a chaotic environment…..never an easy solution to such a complex problem.
Couple things to note:
>the 90% loss of signal for cell phone or two-way, not true. We take the steel shelters to exp[os and have on display at factory and get reception just fine.
> We have two grades of steel, one is primarily for tornado shelters, the other is a Military Grade Steel .263 MIL-DTL-46100 Rev-E. Rejects a NATO .308 armor piercing round.
> Our Hide-Away Shelters have a power actuation battery option for ease of deployment.
> We have several schools with product installed for protection, some schools opt to have shared shelters with adjoining rooms.
> Price, to build a full size FEMA community shelter out building for tornado use for ONE school starts around $750,000. +/- to $5,000,000 +/-
> Shelter in place, not hide in the corner, not go outside, shelter in place saving lives one shelter at a time.
Also our Hide-Away Shelter has been tested http://www.depts.ttu.edu/nwi/research/DebrisImpact/downloads/AboveShelter08132015.pdf