Faxaports include Iceland’s main ports for export and import, moving thousands of containers annually to and from international destinations. The majority of all goods imported to the country pass through Faxaports’ harbours, and the number of ships are increasing every year.

With the growing traffic volume there is a heightened need to monitor the harbours to avoid accidents when loading and unloading the containers from the ships, and to deal with the growing problem of illegal immigrants using Iceland as a gateway to the United States.

Milestone Partner Security Center installed and implemented an efficient solution with Milestone Xprotect Enterprise VMS. This implementation of Xprotect video management software manages a mix of 105 Sony, Vivotek and Hikvision cameras that are installed at all Faxaports’ harbours for maximum security.

This solution allows the security officers to have a full overview of the harbour premises and to monitor the handling of cargo to step in if something is about to go wrong. The guards that are out inspecting the harbours can check up on other areas using the Milestones Mobile client. This also provides the unique remote Video Push feature to send video from the cameras on their mobile devices to the central station, from locations where there may not otherwise be a camera. This gives the security personnel an extended overview of the harbours regardless of their own location.“We are using our time much more efficiently after installing Milestone Xprotect video management software. We have gained 1,000 extra man-hours every year,” says Hallur Árnason, Port Security Officer at Faxaports.

This has allowed security officers to cover more responsibilities than before. One of these is dealing with the rising number of illegal immigrants in Iceland who are using Faxaports’ harbours to try to get to the United States. With the extensive Milestone video solution, Faxaports can better manage illegal immigration.

“We had an incident where one of our security officers monitoring our harbours identified a person digging a hole to crawl under the fence that secures the area where ships with destination to USA are situated. When the police arrived, they found the individual from the video plus two other individuals trying to get on board a ship heading to the United States. When we had another look at our video footage, we were also able to identify a fourth person hiding in the area. We would never have been able to detect them all if we hadn’t had the Milestone VMS,” tells Hallur Árnason.

In addition to preventing illegal immigration, the video system secures the anchored ships against break-ins and vandalism. “Many of the piers are open to the public so everyone has access to the main harbour areas - vandals along with other people. That creates a need for good surveillance. With the huge number of people passing through the harbours, it can seem like an impossible task to have an overview of everything at the same time - but we made it possible with Milestone,” states Hallur Árnason.