Wayne County expands emergency communications interoperability

Computerworld - Communications interoperability is a problem facing nearly all of the nation's 50,000 emergency response authorities that will take years to fix. But Wayne County, Mich., has already launched a system to connect 42 different cities, towns and jurisdictions over a common communications platform and is moving to the next step to include more than 300 chemical plants.
The county, with a population of 2.2 million that includes Detroit, began its journey to link different radios, cell phones, laptops and data handhelds more than two years ago. For the past 18 months, it has been adding functionality to software provided by Codespear LLC, said Mark Hammond, deputy director of the county's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, in a recent interview.
The system provides both interoperability and alert notification to business and residents, and will soon be expanded to take alerts from the many chemical plants in the area, he said.
So far, the county has spent about $750,000 in grant funds on the technology. It's money well-spent, considering how long the federal umbrella effort known as Safecom is expected to take, Hammond said. "Compared to the federal Safecom program, which will take $256 billion through 2017, this is technology here now and gives us an interoperability fix now," he said.
"The Achilles' heel of emergency management is lack of interoperability," Hammond said. Since the beginning of the use of radio communications by police and fire and other first responders, hundreds of lives and untold dollars in damage to property can be attributed to slow responses because of communications problems, he said.
But with the system in place today in Wayne County, residents are already alerted on wire-line or cell phones about coming tornadoes and other emergencies. Also, first responders have sent back photos of a fire scene from their personal cell phones to be distributed to various jurisdictions to help fire commanders decide whether to send more help, Hammond said.
One especially useful part of the system is that Wayne County can alert various jurisdictions quickly and securely when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raises its security threat rating, so that jurisdictions know to lock doors and add guards to power plants and water supplies, Hammond said. Before, the various jurisdictions were not always sure the change in the threat rating was legitimate.
Similar capabilities will be possible for chemical plants in a coming phase, he said. He estimated that there are 115 such plants in Wayne County outside Detroit and more than 200 in Detroit.
Hammond is