Florida Prisons Fight Lightning Strikes

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Officials at the Florida Department of Corrections hope to expand their use of special technology that protects electronic equipment from lightning damage by detecting strikes before they occur.

“All our facilities get struck regularly,” says Johnny Williams, Maintenance & Construction Officer at the Florida DOC. “I get three to four facilities reporting lightning damage every week.”

The rate of strikes in Florida is unusually high because the state has two opposing sea breezes, forcing ground air upward and triggering thunderstorms. Lightning can damage everything from fence sensors to telephone and data lines to freezer generators.

Florida DOC officials are currently in talks with Rabun Labs to install the company’s equipment-protection technology at all the state's prisons after trying the system at the Santa Rosa, Liberty, and Madison correctional institutions. According to Dan Young, president of Rabun Labs, the Florida prison system is the first correctional agency to use the nine-year-old company's detection and protection equipment.

Young is scheduled to make a presentation on lighting strikes at the upcoming Construction and Maintenance Institute for Criminal Justice Agencies, which begins October 19 in Houston. He says the system is not a conventional strike-protection system that works via grounding, but is a system that detects lightning before it hits. After sensing a possible strike, the system quickly switches over all equipment to a back-up power source, and coax switching units isolate sensitive electronic equipment from the main power grid.

“We've had some devastating strikes that destroyed circuit boards and microprocessors on generators,” says Williams, who reports that equipment tied to the lightning detection and protection system has survived even the most powerful strikes, paying for itself after just one lightning season.

Although Florida's budget crisis making funding unsure, Williams tells Correctional News that he is particularly interested in a possible lease-purchase agreement with Rabun Labs that would cost between $300 and $400 per facility, per month. A lease-purchase agreement would also allow the DOC to list the units under the operating budget rather than the capital outlay budget, which makes the expense easier to manage.

“Our staff said it was snake oil at first, but since we installed the equipment, they've all come back to us and said it works,” says Williams, who notes only a few incidents of equipment loss, such as cameras at the top of a pole destroyed by a strike. “It's not going to save you every time, but in our experience, it's well worth the investment,” Williams says.