The golden heart of the bank - Focus.pl

This is how the materials used in the construction of vaults are tested at the Institute of Precision Mechanics in Warsaw. Engineers check how long concrete will last. Depending on this, the vault can be assigned a higher or lower burglary resistance class. And depending on the class: keep larger or smaller amounts of money in it.

LANE OR MODULAR

When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, the city in the blink of an eye collapsed in ruins. There is no stone left on stone. With one exception. There was a bank near the epicenter. The building itself was swept away by an explosion, but its four vaults remained. After the war, the newly appointed branch manager of Teikoku Bank opened the battered doors of the vaults and, to his surprise, found all their contents - cash, documents and valuables intact. He described it in a letter to the vault producer, the American company Mosler Safes - which has since advertised its products as capable of withstanding anything, even an atomic bomb explosion. The treasuries in Hiroshima were built using the most traditional technique: they were so-called cast vaults. Their massive walls, floors and ceiling were created during the erection of the building by pouring concrete. A room built in this way has very thick walls (from several dozen centimeters to over a meter). Practically speaking, it is being built once and for all. It is difficult to dismantle them in any way, unless the property is spent on this purpose. Cast treasuries are built during the construction of bank buildings from scratch. But today, banks are more likely to move into homes that already exist. In this case, a vault is built from modular panels, i.e. rectangular fragments. The panels are prepared in advance in the factory, brought to the site and there, in the bank, they are welded together - from the inside, so that the weld site is invisible. Such a treasury has walls much thinner (from several to several dozen centimeters thick) than the same-class mastic treasury. However, it is several times more expensive: because the panels are made of very expensive materials, thanks to which concrete has exceptional durability. - The price of a treasury with an area of ​​about 20 square meters is usually several hundred thousand zlotys - says Robert Rybak from the Eurosafe company, which builds these types of rooms. The panels are made of special concrete, to which the so-called plasticizers - they make concrete 10 times more durable than ordinary building materials. The treasury producer buys a ready-made mix of powders and, according to a strict recipe (the most important thing is not to add too much or too little water), prepares concrete and casts the panels. Although the word casting does not quite fit it here: concrete is so dense that it is applied rather than poured into molds. Then the panel spends several dozen minutes on the vibrating table so that there is no air bubble left in it. fiber. They are bristles made of plastic or steel, about half a millimeter in diameter and 2.5 centimeters long. Their task is to make concrete resistant to the action of a manual or pneumatic hammer. But a well-equipped burglar doesn't have to hit a vault with a sledgehammer. He can use a diamond crown, i.e. a special drill that looks like a thick hollow pipe with a diameter of several to several dozen centimeters. If you drill through the wall of the treasury, it will create a large hole through which you can insert a hand or a tool. To protect yourself against the attack of the crown, special pipes filled with balls are embedded in the concrete. The balls get caught between the teeth of the crown and the crown jams. An oxygen lance is a tool even more dangerous than the crown. It is something like a giant burner: pure oxygen flows from the cylinder through a long tube and is burnt at the end of the tube. The flame temperature is around 4.5 thousand. degrees. The oxygen lance is used to smelt small round holes next to each other to create a breach in the vault. There is actually no material that can resist this tool. Builders can only make sure that the walls are as thick as possible, made of the best, non-fusible concrete, and the reinforcement of the highest quality steel. Fortunately for bankers, the oxygen lance is a very bulky piece of equipment, its transport and use are troublesome.

Impregnable castle

It's easiest for burglars to attack the vault from the side of the door, so they are usually a class or two better than the rest of the vault. The most important thing in the door is the lock. Contrary to popular belief, there are locks that cannot be opened by any thief, says Jerzy Chytła from the Institute of Precision Mechanics. - They include the so-called protector. The latches in this lock are placed in different planes and the complexity of the entire mechanism is so high that it cannot be opened without a key, so why are such locks not used everywhere: in apartments, in shops? - They are too expensive - says Jerzy Chytła. - What is the point of spending over a thousand zlotys on a lock and inserting it into an ordinary door that can be easily broken by a burglar? In addition, the protector has the feature that when it is open, the key must be in the door. This is cumbersome. In addition to the usual locks, combination mechanisms are used. He introduced them to the production of Linus Yale Jr. in the 1860s. But the robbers quickly learned to open them. For example, you can drill a hole, insert a mirror into a vault or safe and see what the combination of the latches is. You can also intimidate the cashier and force him to reveal the code. In both of these ways, security manufacturers found advice. First of all, in the doors of safes and vaults, they began to install glass from the inside, the breaking of which automatically locks additional bolts. The door is no longer open then. Secondly, a time-delayed castle was built in the 19th century. Even after the thief forced a code from the cashier, he still had to wait for the lock to open. By that time, the police were able to get there. In response, burglars began to develop the art of forcing through vaults by pressing gunpowder into a crack at the door, or by pouring nitroglycerin and blowing the door up. The vault builders then sealed the door openings. The surface between the door and the wall is shaped like steps. Additional security measures have been developed along with the advancement of electronics. The vaults are equipped with sensors of movement and temperature changes. Electronic combination locks have been introduced: much more convenient than mechanical ones. In a mechanical lock, you have to focus on setting the combination, turning the dial the appropriate number of times. - Electronic locks are the most convenient, but unfortunately they are several times more expensive than mechanical locks of the same class - says Robert Rybak from Eurosafe. The vaults always have more than one lock. The practice of using them is such that the first one is opened, for example, by the manager in the morning and closed in the evening, and the cashier knows the code only for the second, additional lock. Electronic locks are equipped with a memory, so you can always see who and when opened them. If an institution cares about exceptional security, it informs individual employees only about fragments of the code that opens the lock. You can also program an emergency combination in the event of a robbery, which opens the door but also triggers the alarm.

FAKE GARDENERS

Bank vaults are secured so well today that thieves rarely risk trying to rob them. They know that even if they manage to get in, there is still a huge risk that they will activate one of the alarm systems and be caught before they escape with the loot. - It is much easier to steal large amounts of money during transport, and more precisely: during transhipment - says Jerzy Chytła. In December 2007, a Berlin hairdresser accidentally found in a garbage bin the exact plans of the treasury in the newly renovated Bundesbank building. An honest citizen referred the plans to the owners. Later, Bundesbank representatives reassured the public, claiming that even if the plans were to fall into the hands of a burglar, robbing a modern vault would be an impossible task. One can get the impression that bankers today believe that their vaults are 100 percent places. secure. That the era of burglary into vaults is over. But that view is easy to disprove. Well, the biggest break into the treasury in history took place recently: in August 2005. The Banko Central in Fortaleza, Brazil, was robbed. The thieves rented a property near the bank and hung the sign "Garden company" - so that no one would be surprised that every now and then a car with dirt left the property. And it came from a carefully dug trench. Equipped with GPS, the villains dug a tunnel almost 80 meters long and reached the vault. They worked patiently until they broke through more than a meter thick concrete floor, theft over the weekend. They brought out cash in the total value of 164 million reais, or about 200 million zlotys. And it was in old banknotes intended for destruction - thanks to which they could immediately start spending money without the risk of a mishap. Despite a sophisticated plan, the thieves did not avoid a stupid mistake: one of them left a phone card in the tunnel. On this basis, the police arrested several dozen people. But the money was not recovered by the policemen: so far they found only a dozen or so percent of the stolen cash. The break-in at Bank Central was like a bolt from the blue for the employees of this institution. Banko Central didn't even take out a break-in policy! No one from the bank became interested in the suspicious gardening company right next to the bank, no one thought that in the 21st century criminals could use the usual old-fashioned undermining. The paradoxical conclusion of this story is: the better guarded vaults are, the worse they are guarded. The technical advancement of security measures lowers the vigilance of bankers and guards. Criminals are just waiting for it. Łukasz Kaniewski