By Some of you who work at Yongsan Garrison may now have a new way of entering the facility:
Officials are installing seven unmanned pedestrian gates in Area II that will let people enter the installations using their Department of Defense identification cards.
The Enhanced Security Pedestrian Gates — or “pods,” as some call them — should be installed within 30 days, and then will be tested for 30 to 45 days, Ricky Oxendine, U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan’s director of emergency services, said at a recent Community Information Forum.
After using an identification card to enter the gate and closing the outer door, the person inside scans their fingerprint over a biometric reader. If the fingerprint is accepted, a second gate opens into the installation. The gates are designed to allow only one person to enter at a time, but guards will monitor the gate through closed-circuit television and can override the system if someone enters with small children. [Stars & Stripes]
Read the rest for details where these gates are located. What I found most interesting about this article is that each gate cost $160,000 to install. They installed seven of them which means USFK spent $1,120,000 for these new gates. A case could be made that this is a good investment over the long term since gate guards are not being employed to check ID’s, but Yongsan Garrison is supposed to be closing and moving to Camp Humphreys in the coming years. Shouldn’t USFK being installing these gates over there instead?
4:00 am on November 4th, 2009 1
This has all the makings of an Epic Fail.
Reply
6:23 am on November 4th, 2009 2
It’s baffling…there is loads of construction, barracks remodeling, road re-surfacing, etc., etc. going on all over Area I and Area II.
Having said this…I’ll be very surprised if Yongsan is closed by the end of the next decade. It’s just going to be pushed back farther and farther.
Reply
6:34 am on November 4th, 2009 3
Yes, I observed the same thing–massive infrastructure improvements going on all over Yongsan. It’s almost as if no one is going anywhere anytime soon…
Reply
10:05 am on November 4th, 2009 4
Having been stationed in Korea 3 times over the last several years I’m here to tell you Yongsan isn’t moving any time soon. We were told in 2004 when I was in Yongsan things were going to close in 3 years…well 5 years later they’re still making improvements everywhere and hardly anyone has moved. I will say this there have been several closures of SMALL camps but no Major Camps are anywhere near shutting down.
Reply
November 4th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
…and in the meantime budgets have been cut and people have been laid off. Is the USFK run by someone who used to work for the Canadian government?
Reply
November 5th, 2009 at 12:13 am
The entire western corridor was closed, which adds up to a pretty big camp. Stanley and CRC are practically deserted, same as Casey (at least compared to before).
If you could actually look at the population and equipment you could see that 2ID left, they just didn’t tell anyone.
Reply
4:19 pm on November 4th, 2009 5
No one actually wants it to close but the real estate speculators…
Reply
November 4th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
They probably dream about it every night…in a very sexual manner.
Reply
4:22 pm on November 4th, 2009 6
For all of you confused about why there are still improvements on Yongsan:
Take a trip to Humphreys, you can see the build up happening. However, meeting the 2014 YRP deadline is not even close to being likely and the U.S. already made a mistake when they canceled a bunch of projects 10 years ago for YRP, which screwed the soldiers and civilians by having them live in bad facilities. The improvements on Yongsan now are designed for the next 5 years or so but not longer. Those improvements are paid for by the U.S. while YRP is paid for (mostly) by Korea.
As far as the PODs, they are planned for Humphreys as well. Will the ones in Yongsan be moved and reused? We hope so.
Reply