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Kadena sounds an end to nuisance alarms

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Alesia Goosic
  • 18th Public Affairs
KADENA AIR BASE, Japan --  Imagine it's 4:30 on Friday afternoon and you're driving toward Gate 1. You've had a long day at work and all you want to do is go home and start your weekend. Then as you approach the gate, you notice that the gate is closed and security forces isn't letting anyone off the base ... again.

False alarms setting off Kadena's Electronic Security System is often the cause of these inconvenient gate closures and the 18th Security Forces, 18th Communications and the 18th Civil Engineer Squadrons teamed up to try to minimize the number of false alarms, decreasing the gate closures and the man-hours spent responding to alarms and manning facilities.

"Essentially if an alarm goes off, it doesn't matter what the alarm is, we have to respond," said Senior Master Sgt. Jared Skinner, 18th Security Forces Squadron operations superintendent. "If we respond down and it does have a problem where the alarm circuit cannot come back up, that owner/user is responsible for posting and manning that facility until those alarms are fixed."

Sergeant Skinner said that a review of data in 2009 showed an increase in the number of alarms received and sparked an interest in finding out what was causing the increase.
"It was at that point that we decided we were going to assemble a rapid improvement team," Sergeant Skinner said, "to try to find out why these, or where these, increased alarms were coming from. That team was assembled selecting folks that had subject matter expertise in the area relative to what we were studying. As we put the team together and began to break down the problem, it became pretty obvious that our target area was going to be false alarms and nuisance alarms."

More research into the problem identified that the main causes for the false and nuisance alarms were degraded communication cables and weathered power transformers. At that time, security forces teamed with the 18th CS and 18th CES to come up with a solution.

"The systemic problem appeared that it was dealing with communication and power," Sergeant Skinner said. "It just became an obvious decision to bring CE and Comm into that fold as well and make them a part of this team."

The civil engineers identified areas with degraded electrical power, improved air conditioning output in each area and conducted a 100 percent function check of 181 back-up power supplies, he said.

The communication squadron tested alarm circuits to identify voltage and decibel loss at each alarm point.

"Once we actually monitored which lines were holding up, we were able to switch everything to lines that were more reliable and the problem started clearing away," said Staff Sgt. Eric Mann, a network systems analyst. "We had to go out to every single facility that had an alarm, which is over 161 facilities, and then go through and test them and reroute all these pairs."

In the end, it was the collaboration between the three squadrons that solved the issues with the alarm systems and improved the performance and reliability.

"We actually got down and actually did the real labor behind what it takes to keep a system like this going," Sergeant Mann said.

The efforts of these squadrons, and the hard work of their Airmen, led to a decrease of monthly power failure alarms from 505 to 70 and monthly communication failure alarms from 161 to 94 in the first 60 days, resulting in an overall reduction of 90 percent of false alarms, saving almost four thousand man-hours and more than $30,000 base wide.

As a result of this significant improvement, the team has been selected to compete for the Chief of Staff's Team Excellence Award at the Air Force Association convention in Washington, D.C. this month.

Next time you're waiting in backed up traffic due to a closed gate, just remember that the 18th SFS, CS and CES have worked together to substantially reduce the chances of that happening.