Harry Dickinson was working in his machine shop when a client in the drive-in cinema industry came to him with a problem: Kids were driving their cars into the outdoor cinemas through the exits and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping them without posting guards.

In the early 1970s, Dickinson designed and built a spike strip that would puncture the tires of any vehicle going in through the exits. Similar spike strips had been around for decades, but Dickinson standardized the design. Soon banks and savings and loans found out about them and wanted controlled access to their parking lots, too.

Today, those spike strips can be found in parking lots all over the country, accompanied by the warning: “Do Not Back Up Severe Tire Damage.”

Dickinson went from his success with spike strips to launch Delta Scientific Corp., a business specializing in barriers that fall back and flatten to allow authorized vehicles through, but spring up to block unauthorized ones.

In the 33 years since its founding, Palmdale-based Delta Scientific has emerged as one of the premier barricade companies in the nation; its equipment can be found protecting hundreds of government and diplomatic facilities in the U.S. and abroad, as well as other sites such as nuclear power plants, airports and reservoirs where security is a prime concern. Annual revenues are now in the $30 million to $40 million range.

“We’re in the business of protecting high-value targets from attacking vehicles,” said Dickinson, who is now 80 and gradually handing over business operations to son David.

Delta Scientific makes several types of barricades, including posts called bollards that can be raised or lowered, small portable barriers that cost as little as $10,000 per road lane protected, and huge permanent barriers with deep foundations that can exceed $40,000 a lane. Two of the biggest customers are the U.S. military including air bases in the Unites States and portable barriers that are now being used in Iraq and the State Department.

Several attacks over the years have tested the performance of Delta Scientific’s barriers, including one in Argentina in 1987; another at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1998; and another in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004.

In the Jeddah attack on the U.S. Consulate, a vehicle rushed through the Delta Scientific barrier as it was down to allow an authorized vehicle to pass. But a second Delta Scientific barrier right behind the first one stopped the truck, forcing the attackers to flee and engage in a firefight with guards. Five guards died, but so did the four attackers, who ultimately were unable to penetrate the building.

Cyclical business

By its very nature, ground security is a boom-bust business, with interest surging after major attacks like bombings of U.S. embassies abroad or Sept. 11. Then, after a few years, interest wanes until the next incident.

“The farther away we get from an event, the more security returns toward where it was before,” said Sandra Jones, a security industry consultant based in Cleveland.

Delta Scientific has lived that boom-bust cycle. Orders and personnel shot up dramatically in the months after Sept. 11 so much so that the company had to lease another facility to make the barriers, and its staff more than doubled to around 450.

One customer that purchased barricades from Delta Scientific after 9/11 was the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, which wanted to safeguard its reservoirs and water treatment facilities from conventional or biological attacks.

“I had our engineering staff look on the Internet and find out what the feds were using to protect their buildings and that’s how we ran across Delta Scientific,” said Jim Yannotta, assistant director of water resources for L.A.’s water and power agency. He said only one other company bid for the project besides Delta.

Yannotta said there were some problems initially getting the controls to work so that the barriers could be integrated into the DWP security system. There were also some glitches in raising and lowering them on a few seconds notice. But since those initial kinks were worked out, the barricades have been up and functioning for nearly five years.

“They are certainly imposing and have been a very good deterrent against any organized force trying to come through,” he said.

New markets, products

Today, Delta’s workforce has shrunk back to 168, and they all have plenty of room to work after the company moved from Santa Clarita last year into a new facility in Palmdale that includes the corporate headquarters.

What’s more, as one of only a handful of barricade companies in the U.S., Delta Scientific has largely saturated the public sector’s barrier business, according to Bill Zalud, editor of Security Magazine in Bensenville, Ill. “They have to find new markets, preferably on the corporate side where there are significant infrastructure assets to protect.”

That’s precisely what Delta Scientific is doing, David Dickinson said. The company is making an aggressive push for corporate customers in the U.S. and government customers abroad. In the last few months, orders have shipped to several Asian countries, including South Korea, and to Europe and Middle East. On the corporate side, Delta Scientific barricades are now going up as part of Anschutz Entertainment Group’s L.A. Live project in downtown Los Angeles.

Also, Harry Dickinson said the company continually develops new barrier products. Just in the last couple months, Delta Scientific has begun to market what it terms a “soft barrier,” one that yields a little so as to prevent significant damage to the oncoming vehicle. Delta’s traditional barricades cause so much damage to the vehicle that the risk of serious injury to a driver and passengers in a runaway vehicle is high.

This barrier is designed for locations that draw large crowds where out-of-control cars can run over and kill bystanders. “We looked at the Farmer’s Market tragedy in Santa Monica and said to ourselves, ‘There has to be some way we can protect crowds from accidental hits from an errant vehicle without crippling the vehicle or its occupants,'” David Dickinson said. “That’s when we came up with the idea of a barrier that yields ground but still stops the vehicle. It’s an example of how we look at gaps in product availability and develop something to fill that gap.”

He said interest in the soft barrier has come from the organizers of the Rose Bowl and the Tournament of Roses parade, among others.