Remote yard and site monitoring in Gary

Local and live

On Lake Michigan, next to Gary Works

Gary grew up around U.S. Steel's Gary Works, a mill on the Lake Michigan shoreline that still has an annual capacity of 8.2 million tons of steel and runs on four blast furnaces, even though its workforce has shrunk from more than 30,000 in the early 1970s to about 2,256 employees in 2023. The mill's own Gary Railway, run by Transtar and tracing back to the old Elgin, Joliet & Eastern line before Canadian National bought that railroad in 2007, moves steel products in and out by rail rather than the road. Gary/Chicago International Airport, on the city's southwest side, has carried UPS Airlines cargo flights to and from the airline's Louisville hub since November 2020, on a main runway extended to 8,859 feet in 2015, and both I-80/94 and I-65 reach the city's lakefront industrial corridor.

A mill and a rail yard that size are not easy to watch from a guard booth. The FBI's 2024 Uniform Crime Report put Gary's motor vehicle theft count at 548, more than three times Indiana's statewide number and well above the national number, both counted per 100,000 people. Gary police have found that exposure up close before: officers raided a towing company on the city's near north side and recovered 17 vehicles reported stolen from Gary and several neighbouring cities, several of them already stripped of their engines, with seven more stacked beside a portable crusher the operator kept on site. A steel supplier's yard or a trucking terminal holding trailers overnight faces the same kind of opportunistic theft once the gates are shut for the night.

A property the size of a mill supplier's yard or a rail-served warehouse can't rely on someone walking the fence line at 2 a.m. Sigma's answer is an agent already watching every camera on the property, every hour of the year, so AI flagging a person near the stock doesn't sit unseen until the next shift arrives. The agent decides on the spot whether a talk-down through the speakers is enough or police need to be on the way, with the footage going out alongside the call. The same agents can run the gate for scheduled trucks and check trailers for damage and seal condition between loads.

Also covering East Chicago, Merrillville, Portage, Griffith, Hobart, Lake Station, Chesterton, Munster.