Copyright 2006 by PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media, Inc.
By Bob Galvin
Fire Chief
On a quiet early morning in Canby, Ore., a bedroom community south of Portland, activity inside one unit at a local apartment complex is about to turn disruptive. After weeks of careful surveillance, the Canby Tactical Entry Team, aided by the Canby Fire Department, descends upon the apartment unit and its hidden meth lab, arrests its operators, and confiscates equipment used to make the potentially lethal drug. The surprise raid, which clearly has left the suspects’ nerves jangled, goes well.
Of course, raids like this often don’t go this smoothly, and usually the local fire department would never be involved. So why is this particular scenario so different? Fire Capt. Val Codino explains that the answer is a combination of a commitment to preplanning buildings in Canby along with sharing this information with both the police department and the Clackamas County 911 Communications Center. Such information-sharing and mutual cooperation among agencies when responding to incidents is a key part of a growing trend within the incident response industry known as interoperability.
“Part of your information loop is being able to talk together, but the information and preplanning, which is historically done by the fire department for fire situations, can also be valuable for law enforcement,” says Codino. “Law enforcement has seldom really preplanned a building for a tactical scenario. This is starting to happen, but there’s no need for them to duplicate what we already have in the fire service.”
Fine-tune incident responses
To help the police get up to speed with preplans, Codino approached the Canby Police Department specifically to show how fire and police could benefit from sharing information that the fire department compiled using special software.
The software, from The CAD Zone Inc., includes The Fire Zone, which is used to draw accurate and clear pre-fire, post-incident and fire investigation drawings, and First Look Pro, a pre-incident planning organizer with mobile mapping. Unlike other general-purpose drawing software programs, these applications are designed specifically for pre-incident planning and allow first responders from both agencies to benefit from the same critical plans. Like firefighters, police users of the software can view information about the structure, access, utility shut-offs, hazards and contacts. Every record also can include diagrams, photographs, tactical plans and other documents.
Codino, who also is a medic, serves on the police department’s tactical entry team. Through this relationship he was able to share the fire department’s pre-incident plans with the police department. Not long after the police department started using the fire department’s pre-incident plans on mobile data terminals in the patrol cars, the meth lab investigation began, leading up to the raid. Using the preplan software’s mapping program, the team could pinpoint the exact location of the apartment suspected of running the lab.
“The preplan enabled me to plan the raid with police incident commanders and to coordinate and choreograph how were going to effectively serve the warrants,” Codino says. “All of the officers on the team could see what we were going to do, how the raid was going to flow, and where police units should cover in case somebody tried to flee.”
And how did the raid go? “The raid was flawless,” Codino says proudly. “In 40 minutes both units were secured, people were taken to jail, and drugs and weapons were taken off the street. Five guys went to jail and nobody got hurt.”
Federal programs set pace
Events like the meth lab raid are great examples of how improved interoperability will enable communities to prepare for more complicated, larger-scale incidents. With police and fire personnel and county 911 dispatchers working together, it’s only a matter of time before their collective resources will be tapped for a more potentially threatening situation.
Putting interoperability into action is a major commitment of resources, technology and funding. This can be a challenge given that cash-strapped police and fire agencies already are burdened with just trying to keep up with each day’s raft of incidents that require immediate response and handling.
It’s for this reason that the Department of Homeland Security established the National Response Plan, which uses an all-hazards approach to better enable the United States to manage domestic incidents. The plan is designed to help save the lives of both the public and first responders/recovery workers, ensure homeland security, protect property, restore resources, and conduct investigations to resolve any major incident.
Another related program is the National Incident Management System, which spells out specific incident command procedures; equipment acquisition; interoperable communications processes and systems; and supporting technologies, including voice and data communications systems, information systems, and data-display systems.
Sharing preplans
Canby Fire District administers one master database, created with First Look Pro, for both the Canby Police Department and the Clackamas County 911 Center. Pre-incident drawings of all buildings, using Fire Zone, also originate within the fire district. The drawings are disseminated to the police and 911 center. Updates of preplan drawings then are e-mailed to police and 911 dispatchers so they can update their databases in software supplied by the fire district.
Now that police and 911 dispatchers can reference the same information when an incident arises that requires their involvement, they can respond with peak efficiency. According to Police Sgt. Tim Sommer, “The preplans give you the chance to know which building you’re seeking, and you can know which way to go in. We want to gather information about a building ahead of time so we can make some decisions.”
The spate of school shootings over the last few years demonstrates the value of sharing pre-incident plans in case of major incidents. For example, now that all Canby agencies have access to the preplans, if an active shooter starts an incident at a local school, police and emergency medical teams can each reference the school’s preplan, set up a perimeter, stage responders, and go into the school and find the shooter. Meanwhile, a 911 dispatcher covering the incident can use the same preplan to guide responders as they approach the school buildings.
During the shooting incident at Columbine High School, radio communications inside the school was hampered by background noise of fire alarms and sprinklers that had been triggered. A good pre-incident plan will show details like electric, water and fire alarm shut-offs. With a mobile preplan program, both police and fire agencies will have instant access to the location of these building details that can save critical time and lives.
In fact, the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs recently completed part of a multiphase initiative to make schools safer by mapping every high school facility in Washington state with Rapid Responder. This Web-based, interactive software program gives first responders directions to sites, staging areas and buildings. It also provides floor plans, site plans and indoor/outdoor photos of each building.
The initiative was prompted largely by the rash of school shootings that had occurred around the country following the Columbine incident. A test of the school safety effort came in September 2003, when a student shooter went on a rampage at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Wash. Fortunately, the shooter was contained after only 12 minutes. The software had been used to map the school just weeks before the shooting incident.
System will go wireless
If interoperability is to be successful for responders, there needs to be a way to quickly and consistently update pre-incident plan files. To this end, a wireless network makes sense.
Both Canby’s fire and police departments will soon share and update their pre-incident plans through such a network. Wireless routers installed at the two agencies will automatically survey the mobile data terminals of arriving fire engines, EMS ambulances and patrol cars and update preplans for all buildings. The Canby Fire Department also will e-mail updated pre-incident plans to the Clackamas County 911 Communications Center so that dispatchers always have up-to-date plans before a major incident.
By having the very same preplans as the Canby Fire Department, emergency communications dispatcher Jim Paul says that dispatchers will be able to dramatically improve how they can assist first responders during a major incident.
“If it’s a high-risk building, ... the dispatcher [can] pull up the pre-incident plan in a virtual format and look at the building that’s been laid out by the fire department and show us ways in and out,” Paul explains. “And if police are called, we can tell them over the radio where they’re needed.”
The software is equally effective for fire incidents. Canby fire preplans contain a strategy for extinguishing a fire and placement of the various resources. “With this information, the dispatcher can keep track of where all the responders are going to be,” Paul says.
Technology not cure-all
As crucial a component as technology is to the interoperability process, it’s not a panacea. Until recently, there have been few software programs that allow agencies to share the same pre-incident planning data, and fire and police agencies have evolved without working shoulder-to-shoulder on most incidents.
But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ushered in a new mutual respect between the two services and among all responders, along with a pledge to help each other on incidents. The federal coffers also opened up, with grant money aplenty for emergency preparedness on state and local levels thanks largely to DHS.
“As we think about public safety in a more holistic way, we realize that all of us have a role and should work together,” says Chief I. David Daniels, Fulton County (Ga.) Fire Department. “A lot of what interoperability involves comes down to how an incident is managed. Even if we don’t have radios or pre-incident plans, how will we work together from different agencies and operations seamlessly? That’s where incident management comes in. It’s not solution-based.”
Daniels contends that the fire prevention and safety industry has been practicing interoperability since the early 1900s. When huge fires broke out that sprawled for miles, as they did in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, fire agencies called for help from not only their region, but also nationwide.
Today the sharing of pre-incident plan sharing between fire and police agencies is growing, Daniels says, on a case by case basis. Fire agencies in some regions face more issues than others with respect to making interoperability a reality, but for now he says that “the challenge for this to come about is really more with the law enforcement side.”
Bob Galvin is a Portland, Ore. - based freelance writer with an interest in pre-incident planning and software programs.