The weakest example of dock door construction is that of light weight metal frames and plastic windows.
Do plastic windows in a light weight dock door meet the requirements of the TAPA FSR?
The TAPA FSR says, “All dock doors will be of sufficient strength so the doors will deter and/or delay forced entry by use of small portable hand tools.”
The TAPA FSR allows glass doors on warehouses… but does this apply to dock doors?
Pedestrian Doors
Part of the TAPA FSR requirements say that warehouse pedestrian doors and frames cannot be easily penetrated. If hinges are on the outside, they must be pinned or spot welded. Glass doors are unacceptable unless glass break detectors are fitted or dedicated motion detection is installed. The doors must be fitted with an alarm linked to the central alarm system.
The most important words are “pedestrian doors”. Dock doors are not pedestrian doors. Any requirement for pedestrian doors does not apply to dock doors.
Are light weigh dock doors acceptable? – Perhaps.
If the warehouse is true 24 hours, 7 days a week, 366 days per year operation, there will always be employees working in the warehouse. It could be argued that 24/7/366 operations means that there is always someone there to monitor any attempted break through the plastic windows.
Additional preventive measures could improve the security of the cargo behind light weight dock doors with plastic windows.
Mitigation
Inferred beam technology could be used to monitor unused dock doors during the night and turned off if the door was needed to load or unload. This might be especially applicable if only part of the warehouse is active during the night.
Retractable anti-ram posts could be embedded in the ground and raised during the night to prevent ramming the weak ground level dock doors with a vehicle. However, the anti-ram posts will not stop a person from pushing out a plastic panel and entering the warehouse.
Scissor gates could be installed on the inside of the dock doors to prevent unauthorized persons from gaining easy entry after breaking the light weight dock door plastic windows.
The light weight plastic windows could be treated with dark plastic film that prevents people on the outside of the warehouse from viewing operations inside the warehouse.
In addition, additional lights on the outside of the light weight dock doors and obvious dedicated CCTV cameras mounted in plain view monitoring the dock doors will help deter opportunistic theft attempt.
Conclusion
One thing is absolutely sure: Light weight dock doors with plastic windows will need plenty of effective mitigation measures installed and a waiver from TAPA.