It’s all part of an alert and protection system AFRL engineers developed at Tec^Edge Works in Dayton.
“Basically, they are going to be able to save a bunch of lives,” said Jarrod Brumbaugh, Northmont Middle School principal, where part of the alert and portable door lock system was tested at the school in Clayton in late May.
The AFRL project team at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base won a contest within the science and technology agency in June against three other teams around the nation that challenged researchers and engineers to find the best ways to protect a military installation in an active-shooter situation, said John P. McIntire, a 711th Human Performance Wing engineering research psychologist.
“The problem was huge and broad and ill defined, I think, on purpose to begin with,” said McIntire, who led the researchers. “Our team did take a pretty broad approach and that’s because we didn’t want to leave any segment out.”
How it works
Gunshot detectors alert bystanders and first responders through mobile phone apps and audible alarms in a building. The system detects what kind of weapon a gunman has and can locate what room shots are fired in, researchers say.
Law enforcement officers wear sensors that tell an incident command center and emergency dispatchers where the officers are in the building without using radio communications, he said.
The locks provide security to protect school students to military base personnel, places where deadly mass shootings have happened in recent years.
“Most doors don’t have locks,” McIntire said. “We want to provide some way to protect bystanders until security can get there.”
The nation was reminded of the concerns of an active shooter situation as recently as last week. A false alarm at the Washington Navy Yard on July 2 put employees on lock down and triggered a massive law enforcement response with helicopters and armed officers. The Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., was the site of a deadly mass shooting when a single gunman killed 12 people in September 2013, authorities have said. The suspect also died.
AFRL researchers tested commercial, off-the-shelf door locks on the market today, and found some weren’t strong enough or took too long to set up, McIntire said.
“This could be pretty difficult to do in an emergency situation and you have a couple of seconds,” he said.
Two of the AFRL portable door locks are designed to secure inner swinging doors, and two others for outer swinging doors.
One is a Z-shaped metal lock that hooks to a wall and over a door knob. That keeps a door from swinging open. A flat lock with a backstop slips underneath a door crack, preventing an inner swinging door opening into a room.
“It’s actually a very ingenious way to help save someone from an intruder that most people actually don’t think about,” said Matt Srnoyachki, a University of Dayton Research Institute research engineer and AFRL contractor who helped design two of the four locks.
“They think of throwing things and barricading a door, but they don’t look at the function of how the door actually opens. If you can have something that’s portable, universal, that can save your life and affordable as well, there’s a lot of potential there,” he said.
Researchers reviewed past active shooter incidents, talked to experts and reviewed government documents to come up with an alert and protection system, McIntire said.
Hotel guests or homeowners might be among those who could use the locks, researchers said.
Testing in schools
In May, engineers tested the alert system at the Northmont Middle School in Clayton, and put the locks on classroom doors inside Northmoor Elementary School in Englewood, school officials said.
The alerts have the potential to notify first responders more quickly of an active shooter, said Brumbaugh, principal at Northmont.
“If fine-tuned, it could be utilized in a lot of school buildings and public facilities across the nation,” he said.
Teachers put the Z-shaped metal locks over classroom doorknobs in a safety drill with students at Northmoor, said school principal Shannon Williamson.
Classroom doors remain locked during school hours, but the extra metal lock that hooked from the wall to the door handle boosted security of students and staff, officials said.
Normally, teachers barricade a door and wrap a rope around the door handle as an extra attempt to keep an armed intruder out of a classroom, she said.
The metal door lock hooked over the knob in seconds, she said.
Teachers “felt like it was just a very easy and a safe way to keep the kids safe,” she said. “Any barrier that you can put in place to help a building or help classrooms become more secure is helpful.”
McIntire said the project will donate the locks to the school.
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