Longwatch to participate in WaterSentinel

Norwood, Massachusetts-based Longwatch announced this week that it had been selected by the Environmental Protection Agency to participate in the WaterSentinel Program. Developed in response to HSPD-9, which outlines food and water protection requirements, WaterSentinel is a comprehensive and fully coordinated water contamination monitoring system, with a pilot roll-out scheduled for 2007. While some companies will focus on the water testing itself, Longwatch will install a surveillance system that provides video verification of alarms, thereby freeing up personnel who would have to physically inspect remote sites whenever an alarm sounded.

“The beauty,” said marketing head Joe Siderowicz, “is that all that communication infrastructure is already in place. You can add video, but you don’t need to run any cable or anything.” By infrastructure he means SCADA, the distribution and management system widely used in the utilities industries, and Siderowicz believes the Longwatch Video Surveillance System ability to integrate with the SCADA system was a major factor in winning the WaterSentinel deal. Nevertheless, the company will have to do its own integration and installation.

“The installation is a skillset that the SCADA guys don’t have,” Siderowicz said. “We need installation partners. I’d love to connect with them … [but] the SCADA integration is a really tricky little deal. The question of the day is whether the typical security integrator can sell this? Well, not unless they’re committed to working with SCADA.”

Longwatch has already completed twenty such installations, with thirty underway “and a huge backlog.” The company’s next market push will be toward the petro-chemical market and other utilities that use the SCADA protocol.

-read more in this L. Samuel Pfeifle Security Systems News report