When you consider threats to your building, do you also consider that a car can be used as a weapon?
While the idea of a car crashing through a wall into your business may seem far fetched, it happens more frequently than you’d think. According to the Storefront Safety Council, a safety advocacy group, drivers crash their cars into buildings an average of 60 times a day.
While many of these incidents are accidents — either very young or very old drivers hitting the gas rather than the brakes, for example — others are deliberate crimes. The Storefront Safety Council found that 6% of all incidents were part of “ramraid” or crash and grab robberies. Retail stores and restaurants were most impacted by these incidents.
Fortunately, there’s a simple protection measure businesses can invest in: bollards.
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A bollard is any object that prevents a moving vehicle from colliding with a building, or from entering a pedestrian-only area, like a walking center in a city or a park. Bollards can take many forms: they can be metal posts, concrete structures like the dividers on a highway. Some bollards are retractable — they may slide into the ground so that a vehicle can enter a space when needed. Other bollards can only be movable by machines. Others, like fountains, are permanent.
Plenty of organizations use bollards for security. If you think about some of the big box stores or malls you’ve visited in the past, you may remember the bollards — non-descript posts or reinforced trash cans or lights, in some cases, giant concrete balls for some other brands.
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Bollards are one of the most underutilized security measures available to businesses, and yet they’re capable of preventing a great deal of destruction. According to the Storefront Safety Council, 500 people are killed yearly when cars ram into buildings, and an average of 4,000 are injured.
There are, however, some things you should know before choosing and installing your bollards. Below are best practices for using bollards: