Site security in Belfast, built around your programme.

Belfast has more live building sites at any one time than most other parts of Northern Ireland, from apartment schemes around the docks and Titanic Quarter to industrial units off the Boucher Road and infrastructure work on the approach roads into the city. A rapidly deployable CCTV tower is usually the first thing a site manager asks for. Mast mounted cameras with built in detection mean an intruder crossing the compound at night triggers an alert rather than being spotted on a recording the next morning, with footage checked remotely from a phone.

Many Belfast sites, particularly demolition and groundworks jobs on tight urban plots, have no mains supply until the build is well underway. A solar powered tower covers that gap, running independently of the site's own power and moving to wherever the compound is that week. Plant and materials are usually the target, given the number of vehicles and trade access points around a typical city centre or Harbour Estate job, so towers cover the yard, the compound gate and the areas where machinery and materials are stored overnight.

• Mast cameras with built in detection and remote monitoring
• Solar powered towers for sites without a mains supply
• Temporary intruder alarms for compounds, cabins and stores
• Positioned to cover the compound gate, yard and plant
• Weekly or monthly hire, redeployed as the site progresses

A lot of Belfast sites front onto busy roads such as the Westlink, the M1 and M2 approaches or York Street, where a compound is visible to thousands of vehicles a day and a fence alone does little to stop someone trying their luck after dark. A tower on the site boundary, angled to cover the gate and the road frontage, is usually enough to make a site look like the wrong one to target. Where a site sits back from the road on a docks plot, the priority shifts to the internal compound and the stores instead.

Belfast City Council covers the whole city, and most sites here run to a tighter programme than a rural job, with several trades on site and deliveries arriving through the week. Towers and alarms are set up around the existing site security plan rather than in place of it, and because the same team installs CCTV, alarms and access control across Belfast, a site cabin can be fitted with the same style of alarm used on a permanent commercial job if that suits better.

Every site gets its own assessment, but these are the patterns we see across Belfast.