Tire-Flattening Experts Spike Terrorist Threats
You see them all over the place: Signs threatening: “Warning! Severe Tire Damage”--and, sure enough, a row of spikes looming in the pavement ahead.
In the parking business, those spikes are called saber teeth. Delta Scientific of Burbank is their leading producer, with 90% to 95% of the market in the tire-puncturing devices.
But as ubiquitous as saber teeth are in America’s parking lots, they do not produce enough business to keep Delta growing the way it wants. So the company has started emphasizing another kind of barrier, one that is popping up at embassies, military bases and corporate facilities around the world.
Formidable Obstacle
This one is intended to keep out terrorist car bombers. Designed as a second line of defense behind the gates of guard posts, it is a retractable, wedge-shaped barricade, a cage covered by a steel skin.
When the gate is open, the new barricade lies flush with the street to let cars and trucks in and out. But when the gate is closed, the barricade rises--looking something like a giant piece of pie lying on its side--to pose a formidable obstacle.
Delta, which began making the barricades in 1977, has cornered that market, too, and is profiting from the widespread security concerns that have arisen during the last two years in part because of the series of car and truck bombings at U.S. facilities in Lebanon.
The company’s president, Harry D. Dickinson, 59, said Delta simply has been at the right place at the right time. A former aerospace executive, Dickinson started the business in his family’s Glendale garage in 1974. He owns the business with his wife, Margaret.
Their son, David, 32, is in the business, too. As a vice president of Delta, he handles marketing in South America and most of Asia while the father takes Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Despite the way the company has gobbled up the saber-teeth business, Delta’s barricades--known as “counter terrorist vehicle barricade systems”--accounted for 75% of Delta’s $8.5 million in sales during its fiscal year ended June 30, Harry Dickinson said. The company says that its sales have grown at an average of 50% a year since it opened and that it always has been profitable.
According to the State Department, which has 230 of the barricades at its embassies and offices around the world, only three companies are qualified to make the units to government standards: Delta, Western Manufacturing of Bottineau, N.D., and Baltimore-based Nasatka & Sons.
“Delta’s got a rapport with the government that’s the envy of the rest of us,” said James Page, president of Western Manufacturing, which makes a ribbed barrier that it calls the Portapungi. Page claimed to have 30% of the market and said Delta has most of the rest.
Formerly in Aerospace
Dickinson, who grew up in Hollywood and later studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, spent 20 years marketing aerospace equipment for various companies before getting fed up with big-company ways.
Originally, Delta made water purification systems. But when Dickinson’s steel parts supplier, Buildesign, went out of business months after Delta got started, the fledgling company bought the business and inherited its customers for parking gates.
Dickinson pursued the saber-teeth business, strengthening, he said, what was then the industry standard of weak spikes that tended to break or bend. Delta developed spikes of 3/8-inch steel that punch gaping holes in tires that run over them. By 1979, the company was in the parking equipment business exclusively.
Delta also makes a device, called a loop detector, which electronically senses when a car pulls up to a parking lot ticket dispenser. It then sends a signal to the dispenser to issue a ticket.
“Their stuff is among the best in the business,” said Mike Murray, operations manager for Van Nuys-based Parking Facilities Equipment Corp., which installed parking equipment at Los Angeles International Airport, including Delta’s electronic saber-teeth devices used in rental car lots to prevent thefts. “They’re big.”
The surge in terrorism spurred Delta’s barricades business. In 1985, there were 1,527 bombings worldwide, up 37% from 1982, according to Risks International, the Arlington, Va., terrorist-watch group.
Delta became the biggest in the barricade business by getting there first. Tests of Delta equipment in 1982 at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico set the standard for the industry.
Western Manufacturing says its units are much less expensive than Delta’s, but Delta says the products aren’t comparable. Western Manufacturing’s units sell for between $4,000 and $12,000 each. Dickinson says his units cost between $20,000 and $40,000, “depending on how many bells and whistles you want.” But Delta outsells Western Manufacturing anyway.
Private Clients
Frank Matthews, a State Department spokesman, credited the barriers with helping to foil an attempted bombing in Lisbon in February, although accounts of the incident vary.
Delta also has private clients, including Westinghouse Electric, which uses the units at its nuclear fuel processing plant in Idaho Falls, Ida. A nuclear power plant in South Africa also has Delta barricades.
To reach such far-flung markets, Delta maintains sales representatives in London, Rome, Frankfurt, West Germany, and Washington.
