Screening facility to protect New York's mail from terrorism
Two US companies are currently putting together a 75,000 square foot mail plant outside New York City that would act as an extra line of defence against mail terrorism. Document management specialists The Millennium Group have teamed up with screening technology providers SoBran, Inc., to develop the facility, with construction now underway and operations expected to start mid-November.
Called SafeMail New York, the new plant will contain equipment to screen items for possible chemical, biological, radioactive or explosive threats.
The companies behind it believe it will be of particular importance in serving Wall Street and the financial community.
Frank Farnacci, executive vice president at New Jersey-based Millennium Group, told Post&Parcel that the project had come as a result of a year of dialogue with the company’s customers.
“The Millennium Group provides document management services for numerous corporations who have been exposed to a lot of warnings about mail-based threats,” he said. “We realised there really wasn’t this kind of facility available in the marketplace.
Farnacci said mail being delivered into the new facility would face a short delay for the extra steps of screening it, but he said: “We expect the mail will still get to our customers on the same day – it will just be in the afternoon, rather than in the morning.”
“Highly secure”
Virginia-based SoBran, Inc., has a background in providing mail security for the likes of the US Department of Homeland Security, and has assisted the federal government in defining mail security standards.
The company told Post&Parcel that the “highly secure” SafeMail New York plant would have the capacity to process thousands of pieces of mail an hour, and would have the potential for expansion to handle a “significant percentage of New York City mail”.
Tom Bauer, senior vice president at SoBran, suggested that the processing time could be as short as 90 minutes at the plant, although it will depend on the options required by its customers.
One of the options that is to be made available will be for corporate customers to have their mail opened and scanned for electronic transmission on the last leg of its journey.
The development of the SafeMail New York facility comes 10 years after a series of attacks on news media organisations and politicians in which anthrax spores were sent through the mail, and just under a year after explosives were uncovered within the mailstream, on UPS and FedEx aircraft being used to transport mail to the US.
Since spring this year, the FBI has been stepping up its warnings to businesses, primarily in the financial community, about the need to increase mail room security, said Farnacci.
The Millennium Group executive VP said the New York was the “first step” in the development of the kind of business mail security that could ultimately extend around the country.
