Posted on 04/23/2008 2:58:07 AM PDT by Aristotelian
TUCSON, Ariz. - The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.
The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson.
Boeing is to replace the so-called Project 28 prototype with a series of towers equipped with communications systems, new cameras and new radar capability, officials said.
Less than a week after Chertoff accepted Project 28 on Feb. 22, the Government Accountability Office told Congress it "did not fully meet user needs and the project's design will not be used as the basis for future" developments.
A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area, the GAO reported.
Although the fence continues to operate, it hasn't come close to meeting the Border Patrol's goals, said Kelly Good, deputy director of the Secure Border Initiative program office in Washington.
"Probably not to the level that Border Patrol agents on the ground thought that they were going to get. So it didn't meet their expectations."
The Border Patrol had little input in designing the prototype but will have more say in the final version, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Certioff and jorge have once again stuck it to the America tax payer and did not use Vaseline. Just bend over and grab your ankles.
A prototype is a design/design validation tool. This one seems to have served its purpose in demonstrating what doesn’t work.
Bet they hired *damp behinds* to do the work.
Neutrals usually aren't made of copper in high tension arrangements. More often than not they are steel or aluminum. In my travels I've seen as much as 50v on the neutral in certain circumstances. Sure, it won't kill you, but if you create a path to ground while grabbing it you won't hold onto it for very long.
It's one thing to steal wire from a house on the secondary side of a transformer. It's another thing entirely to attempt to steal copper from the primary side of an energized circuit.....especially a high tension circuit. I like to call that sort of behavior "natural selection".
It reminds me of the kid in Jerseyville, IL, who thought it would be cool to cut the guy wires on a cell tower I commissioned. He got the first one cut, but lost his head in the process (literally). It wasn't a pretty sight, especially on a Monday morning. We figured he was probably trying to steal the coax on the tower. We later found that "High Radiation Area" signs worked well for keeping the dumb masses from coming near our sites trying to steal whatever was or wasn't nailed down......
Conservatives: “They said we could not achieve Star Wars. Glad we don't listen”
Hint to conservatives...take this job over and PROVE it can work and end the free run at the border by criminal illegals.
Virtual Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Wasn’t this Giuliani’s approach to border security? “..a fence, a virtual fence...”
I’m shocked.
Ping!
Friendo, if you placed two chain link fences on the border, scrapers, many of them from the US, would steal the fence within 6 months; Electrify it and they would steal the copper and transformers in three.
Ok so mine it.... Whatever it takes. Perhaps we could solve our nuclear waste disposal problem. Shallow trenches that have to be crossed. We could find the illegals easily that way. They would glow in the dark.
I can hardly wait for the “tamper-proof” biometric cards.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.