Image Credit: MChee Lee / Unsplash
The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
Carbon Rivers, a Knoxville tech company, recently introduced its latest product to Tennessee lawmakers, school administrators, first responders, and Homeland Security.
The company previously worked with the Tennessee Department of Energy on recycling products but they are now creating lightweight bullet-resistant doors that can be used in schools to help protect students.
“What we wanted to do is put together something that is really innocuous,” said Chief Strategy Officer David Morgan. “It’s just architectural design. We’re not weighing in on having guns, not having guns on red or blue issues.”
Graphene flakes have been turned into a sheet of resistant fiber by the company’s engineers. The sheet is then placed into a bulletproof component that creates the doors.
“All that is a whiteboard that they do their arithmetic and attendance and things like this, so in that sense no one knows it’s ballistic performance materials,” Morgan said.
Funding is not an issue as the costs could be covered by a state public school security grant, but there is concern about whether Carbon Rivers has enough product to go around.
“We certainly have the supply,” Morgan said. “It would be about a three-year cycle to do the entire state and that would be all private and public schools.”
No school system currently has the doors in place, but a dozen schools are on a wait list for them once they are ready for installation.
