Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Incident management in many forms

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 12:41:31 -0400

Incident management in many forms
July 15, 2004 10:24am
Mobile Radio Technology

Interoperability equals working together.” So says Roman Kaluta, manager
of public safety communications interoperability at equipment vendor
Raytheon JPS Communications. Simple as that sounds, managing
communications so agencies can work together when first responders
converge at an incident is in practice a complex job. To aid the effort,
JPS has assembled a team of four “Subject Matter Experts” to help
public-safety agencies choose the technologies and craft the policies
and procedures needed to enable interoperable communications.

JPS announced its SME initiative in March at the IWCE show in Las Vegas.
The idea is to connect customers with public-safety practitioners who
understand their needs. “It's easier for a cop to talk to a cop, a
fireman to talk to a fireman,” said Kaluta, who retired from the
Alexandria, Va., Police Department before joining JPS. His fellow SMEs
come from backgrounds in firefighting, emergency communications and the
FBI.

Part of Kaluta's job is to help customers contemplate and define the
type of interoperability they want to achieve before they choose
equipment to tie together existing radio systems. “Do you want it just
to be on-site with simplex communications?” he asked. “Or do you want
the ability to do wide-area communications and be able to link two,
three, four different radio systems?”

Perhaps the most important aspect of his work is helping customers spell
out in detail how members of different agencies will work together in
the field to overcome the incompatibility of their disparate radio
systems. “There have to be memoranda of understanding and mutual aid
agreements, and there have to be policies and procedures,” Kaluta said.
For example, they must decide who will talk with whom, and who will
control the switch that links different radio systems.

Many agencies already have agreements in place to describe how they will
work together at an incident, but these don't always effectively address
the gritty details of managing radio communications at the scene,
according to Kaluta. “The biggest fear that a lot of our users have is
what [happens] if four people show up with one of these switches and
everybody turns them all on at the same time?” he said.

The SMEs can provide copies of policies and agreements that other
agencies are already using, Kaluta said. They also share advice about
interoperability from federal initiatives such as the Public Safety
Wireless Network (PSWN) and Advanced Generation of Interoperability for
Law Enforcement (AGILE) programs. “That's our main charge, to go over
those things and make sure they've considered them,” he said.

While JPS helps on the planning end, Nextel Communications is offering
on-the-scene services to augment communications during an emergency or
planned event.

Nextel's Emergency Response Team (ERT), founded in 2002, offers the
mechanism to set up multi-agency communications over Nextel's commercial
wireless network. The ERT's main tool is the Satellite Cell-On-Light
Truck (SatCOLT), a mobile cell site that boosts coverage in a Nextel
service area or provides service in a remote region where the carrier
has no infrastructure.
Housed on a Ford F-650 Super Duty truck, the SatCOLT is designed to be
“rapid-deployable, transportable and fully self-sufficient,” said Matt
Foosaner, an ERT senior director stationed in Dulles, Va. It includes a
70-foot cell tower and a satellite antenna to link the site to Nextel's
nationwide network. The site is powered by a 15-kilowatt generator and
carries enough diesel fuel to run for 10 to 12 days, he said.

When the SatCOLT arrives at an incident, ERT members distribute Nextel's
Motorola-built wireless phones to personnel at the scene. Combined with
Nextel phones already deployed by responding agencies, these allow users
from different organizations to talk to each other via the carrier's
Direct Connect push-to-talk service. The ERT can configure talk groups,
“and we can change it on the fly over the air,” Foosaner said. “We never
have to touch those radios again.”

Nextel also is installing JPS's ACU-1000 switch on the SatCOLTs,
Foosaner said. These can provide interoperability between agencies' own
land mobile radios and Nextel's units.

The ERT has assisted in more than 50 field-training exercises and helped
during emergencies such as Hurricane Isabel, the D.C.-area sniper
attacks and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. More recently, SatCOLTs
were deployed at last month's G8 economic summit in Savannah and Sea
Island, Ga., and will be deployed at the Democratic and Republican
National Conventions this summer.

Similarly, Burbank, Calif.-based SatCom Systems has developed two mobile
satellite communications vehicles, one of which was retrofitted from an
ambulance. The vehicles are designed to provide dialtone, two-way radio,
mobile data and teleconferencing services to first responder agencies
deployed to incidents in rural areas where infrastructure is lacking.
“We're trying to bring incident command into the field where it
belongs,” said SatCom President and CEO Tom Soumas.
The vehicles, which recently were used by the Riverside County Sheriff's
Department at a rave, can be deployed “anywhere in the Western U.S.,”and
tap into five satellite systems to provide connectivity, according to
Soumas, who added such capability is becoming more critical.

“FEMA responds to an event every day, on average,” he said. “LMR
fulfills a purpose, but when you're at an event in the middle of
nowhere, it's not just a comfort to have this kind of connectivity, but
a necessity.”
Telemedicine, Texas-style

The future of incident management on U.S. roadways could look something
like the exercise delegates viewed this April at the annual meeting of
the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) in San
Antonio. The demonstration of a telemedicine system called LifeLink came
courtesy of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the San Antonio Fire/EMS
Department, the University of Texas Health Science Center Department of
Emergency Technology, a U.S. Army hospital and several other partners.

LifeLink takes advantage of the fiber optic network that TxDOT has
deployed along 100 miles of freeway in San Antonio to support its
roadside traffic management cameras. TxDOT has added about 150 specially
configured Wireless Ethernet Bridges (WEBs) to this network, providing a
2.4 GHz radio link between the backbone and specially-equipped
ambulances. These allow emergency medical technicians (EMTs) on the
scene to share bi-directional video, voice and medical data with local
hospitals, so physicians can observe patients and lend their expertise
during an incident.

During the ITS America meeting, LifeLink participants staged an
emergency preparedness drill at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center.
“The exercise scenario was a suicide bomb detonation within the
convention facilities,” said E. Sterling Kinkler, Jr., principal
engineer in SwRI's Communications Engineering Department. “A LifeLink
ambulance in the exhibits became the medical command center.”

Personnel at the scene held telemedicine conferences with doctors at the
Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, to discuss
the condition of the most critical live “victims,” Kinkler said. The
system gave BAMC a view of the situation inside and outside the
ambulance and outside the convention center. Participants also displayed
a vest equipped with a video camera, which can transmit images to the
ambulance over a narrowband microwave radio, for relay to the hospital
via the LifeLink system, Kinkler said.

As an ambulance travels along the equipped portion of San Antonio's
freeway network, its onboard WEB usually can “see” two or three of the
fixed wireless units on the roadway, ensuring that it is always in
communication, Kinkler said. TxDOT plans to expand the fiber optic
network and the installed base of WEBs, he said. “It will eventually
cover something like 250 miles of streets and highways in the county.”

Along with conducting research and demonstrations, EMTs have used
LifeLink in several real-life emergencies, Kinkler said.
In the future, the system will support other applications as well. TxDOT
and SwRI have demonstrated the use of mobile cameras and WEBs in traffic
incident management vehicles to transmit video from a highway incident
to San Antonio's traffic management center. Personnel in the truck could
also use the wireless network to obtain video from fixed cameras on
other portions of the road network, Kinkler said. “If there's an
accident or an incident, they'll use those images to plan where they
need to be.”

Also, SwRI and TxDOT successfully tested integration of LifeLink with a
satellite network to provide communications between a disaster scene and
a medical command center, Kinkler said.
— Merrill Douglas

http://www.hoovers.com/free/news/detail.xhtml?ArticleID==NR200407152500.2.3_4e41008aae975be7

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