Milbrulong Water Tower – Photo credit: Scott Nagy and Krimsone
Background
Lockhart Shire, one of the most productive agricultural and pastoral areas in NSW, the centre of farming excellence, a beautiful region located in the Riverina and home to three large Water Tower Murals, the iconic The Rock Hill Nature Reserve – Kengal Aboriginal Place, Galore Hill Scenic Reserve, Greens Gunyah Museum including the Doris Golder Wool Art Gallery and many farm art sculptures dotted around Lockhart itself. Lockhart Shire offers many year round experiences waiting to be explored.
When the administration team at Lockhart Shire Council had budget allocated to improve the security of their locking system from a restricted key system with a design registration that was ending, they considered many options including the popular EVVA EPS high security master key system. These new locks would be subject to the regional NSW environment which can get very hot, dusty, and lots of rain at times, and these factors plus the scalability to expand, patent life to 2035, and many others made the EVVA 4KS decision a breeze.
Implementation
Darren Smallwood, Works Manager at Lockhart Shire Council, “Our council employs just over 50 people, servicing a number of villages, with the main centre located at Lockhart. With 32 different council locations over a large area, we required a locking solution that was flexible enough to meet our needs and that could stand up to our regional weather as many of our locks are external padlocks. We needed a system that allowed specific access to a variety of different combinations.”
In fact, Lockhart Shire Council has over 190 different locks across these 32 different locations. The main council building in what can be described as a controlled area (office building with no weather extremes) to more remote areas secured by Carbine padlocks fitted with EVVA 4KS cylinders.
Ensuring that council workers and community members had easy and secure access to services with a master key system that offered technical protection (authorised dealers can duplicate keys and will only do so on their own key system and typically with a letter of approval from the system owner), legal protection (longest patent protection on a maximum security system in Australia), met Australian standards, and was fully supported by their local EVVA authorised dealer, Riverina Safes & Locks, made the decision to invest in EVVA 4KS a straight forward decision.
“The fact that EVVA 4KS was also SCEC approved including SL3 rated products was just a bonus. We heard about the active slider placement from Robert at Riverina Safes and Locks and we had to see it for ourselves. The fact that there are no springs in the cylinder and the sliders move into place by the curves of the key as it is inserted meant for us a system that can be put out anywhere in Lockhart Shire. We can feel confident that it will open every time for the user, saving us time and money from ongoing cleaning and maintenance,” says Darren.
“Saddling up with Darren and the team at Lockhart Shire Council has been a pleasure. It’s always great to design a new EVVA 4KS system for a client. The fact that this council covers a huge area with major landmarks and communities, means that our solution we had to put forward was secure, scalable with possible key combinations in the billions offering a flexible matrix hierarchy, and reliable,” concludes Robert Hamilton, Manager, Riverina Safes & Locks.
Greens Gunyah Museum – Tim Fischer Collection – Photo credit: Embarketing
