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You will be contacted for a pre-screening and routed to the correct survey.

Please register today!

An internal audit shows that while Atlanta’s emergency response center has made significant progress in answering most 911 calls within 10 seconds, it needs to do more to ensure greater staffing during the center’s busiest times.

City Auditor Leslie Ward said simple fixes such as changing shift schedules and reducing overtime could go a long way in making the department better and more cost-efficient.

City officials agreed with all the recommendations in the audit and set a timetable of six to 12 months to implement them.

“We found the audit to be reasonable. We had no problem with it,” said Deputy Police Chief Erika Shields, who oversees the center. “It is always important to have an outside view, and they provided that. We are already actively engaged on several initiatives.”

In 2012, the center answered 91 percent of incoming emergency calls within 10 seconds, which was a goal of the Atlanta Police Department.

“What is huge is we are exceeding the benchmark of answering the calls,” Shields said, adding that that figure has since ticked up to 93 percent.

Those improvements come less than five years after the center was considered a major liability in the city. In 2009, then-Police Chief Richard Pennington fired 911 Director Miles Butler after a series of high-profile blunders, including a house fire in Grant Park that burned more than 20 minutes after 911 calls came in and before firefighters arrived. That was followed by a fire at a birthday party that raged for 17 minutes before firefighters were dispatched.

But while new goals have been reached, the overall daily performance was uneven. For at least seven hours a day, including the peak late afternoon times, the center fell short of its goals.

Staffing did not increase enough during those peak times while remaining high during quiet times.

The audit showed that during the early morning hours — between 1 and 8 a.m. — the center used more staff to answer calls. During those times, call takers spent more time waiting for calls and only about 25 percent of their time on calls.

Call takers spent close to 50 percent of their time on emergency calls from 3 to 8 p.m.

During those peak times, call takers answered 86 percent of calls within 10 seconds.

Shields said that on each of the center’s three shifts, an equal amount of workers were used because the department assumed that a certain level had to be maintained at all times based on standards established by the Insurance Services Office, an independent company that collects and evaluates such data.

As of Oct. 12, according to the audit, the center had 151 positions filled. Most of them were communications officers, 911 call takers, dispatchers and supervisors.

“Essentially, that had been our approach. But we are learning that we can move people,” Shields said. “What the audit did was made us re-examine our interpretation of ISO standards.”

To compensate for some of the disparities, the center spent $1 million on overtime in 2012.

Shields said that while workers had to be moved occasionally to different shifts, a majority of the overtime was used for cross training, which involved training people on call taking, police dispatch and fire dispatch, all of which are different disciplines.

“They are all different skill sets, and it is critical to have sufficient personnel trained in each area so that we don’t have to utilize overtime,” Shields said.

Ward said proper scheduling could reduce total work hours by 305 hours a week.

“Anytime they can cut off overtime is a direct benefit to the general fund,” Ward said.

In the 42-page report, internal auditors are recommending:

Buying sophisticated work scheduling software that would allow the center to come up with more efficient shifts. Shields said she is already looking for new software and studying what has succeeded and failed in other large cities.

Developing a shift schedule that would align staff with the workload. Ward said this would essentially mean moving some staff from early mornings to afternoons.

Continuing to reinforce the existing call dispatching procedures and monitor dispatch times to make sure call takers transfer information to dispatchers as quickly as possible.

“They have made some real improvements and the performance has gotten better,” Ward said. “And they can maintain that with a lower cost.”

Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

CLEARWATER In a move that may head off a legal battle, Pinellas County officials are set to delay a controversial change to the county’s 911 medical-emergency system until at least the middle of July.

County commissioners in January approved changes to the county’s emergency dispatch so that only an ambulance would be sent to about 14,000 low-priority medical calls, a move that fire chiefs said would mean longer waits for distressed 911 callers.

That criticism and the threat of a lawsuit from St. Petersburg prompted commissioners to push back the change until June 1, long after a consulting firm’sstudy of the proposal was expected to be finished.

With the Fitch & Associates report delayed, though, county Medical Director David Bowden is recommending the Medical Control Board delay the EMS protocol change until 45 days after the county receives the study, which now is expected June 1. The board, which includes emergency-room physicians and hospital administrators, will vote on the recommendation at its meeting May 16.

“I don’t want to start heading down the road we think is correct and then Fitch has a different nuance on it or come up with something different,” said Bruce Moeller, the county’s public safety director.

With the deadline for EMS changes looming, St. Petersburg City Council members on Friday instructed city attorneys to draft another resolution calling for a delay until after the study is released.

That resolution may end up being unnecessary, but it reflects the fierce opposition the county has met as it has looked for ways to reduce the roughly $45 million it will pay this year to Pinellas fire departments to act as medical first-responders.

County leaders say they no longer can afford a 911 service that dispatches both a firetruck and ambulance to every medical call no matter how minor. Under the proposal, known as Phase III, only an ambulance would be dispatched to calls that 911 call-takers classify as “falls” and “sick persons,” which make up about 10 percent of 140,000 medical 911 calls made annually.

At least seven Pinellas cities, including St. Petersburg, and at least four fire districts approved resolutions opposing the EMS changes.

City officials said it made no sense to make changes before the release of the study.

Fire districts also are concerned that reducing the number of calls they make could affect future staffing levels.

It’s a debate that is likely to heat up again when the Fitch report is released.

“At some point, we will either end up in resolution, mediation or a lawsuit,” said St. Petersburg City Council Chairman Karl Nurse. “Maybe that report will suggest some different things that begin a conversation. We’ve been doing this same argument back and forth for three years.”  

Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

The APCO Institute EMD Program, based on EMD guide cards and software, is a systematic way to manage emergency medical service (EMS) resources in an organized and effective manner and to provide medical assistance to callers, when needed, until medically trained field response units arrive at the scene.

Employees of the Acushnet Police Department service a population of approximately 10,217 with two full-time and one part-time civilian staff and 17 full-time and eight part-time sworn staff that receive a call volume of close to 35,000 calls annually.

“The APCO Institute welcomes the Acushnet Police Department as an EMD User Agency and looks forward to working with their staff to provide EMD services to their area,” said APCO Institute Director Julie Troutman.

15-year old hid in closet while calling 9-1-1

ABC News – The dispatcher talked a young girl through a frightening robbery.

The APCO Institute EMD Program, based on EMD guide cards and software, is a systematic way to manage emergency medical service (EMS) resources in an organized and effective manner and to provide medical assistance to callers, when needed, until medically trained field response units arrive at the scene.

“APCO has provided us with an efficient, intelligent solution to maintaining the highest level of training in emergency medical dispatching with an easy implementation process that keeps us accountable to the community we serve,” said Sarah Edie, Administrative Coordinator for Speedway Police and Fire Communications.

Employees of the Speedway Police and Fire Communications service a population of approximately 12,000 with one supervisor, nine full-time operators and three part-time operators that receive a call volume between 35,000 and 40,000 annually.

“The APCO Institute welcomes the Speedway Police and Fire Communications Center as an EMD User Agency and looks forward to working with their staff to provide EMD services to their area,” said APCO Institute Director Julie Troutman.

About APCO International™ (www.apcointl.org)

APCO International is the world’s largest organization of public safety communications professionals.  It serves the needs of public safety communications practitioners worldwide – and the welfare of the general public as a whole – by providing complete expertise, professional development, technical assistance, advocacy and outreach.

The APCO Institute EMD Program, based on EMD guide cards and software, is a systematic way to manage emergency medical service (EMS) resources in an organized and effective manner and to provide medical assistance to callers, when needed, until medically trained field response units arrive at the scene.

“With APCO’s EMD implementation, I predict performance will increase at every level,” said Vicky Bluemke, Carroll County Emergency 9-1-1 Center 9-1-1 Director.

Employees of the Carroll County Emergency 9-1-1 Center service a population of approximately 22,000 with eight full-time staff and eight part-time staff that receive a call volume of close to 22,000 calls annually.

“The APCO Institute welcomes the Carroll County Emergency 9-1-1 Center as an EMD User Agency and looks forward to working with their staff to provide EMD services to their area,” said APCO Institute Director Julie Troutman.

About APCO International™ (www.apcointl.org)
APCO International is the world’s largest organization of public safety communications professionals.  It serves the needs of public safety communications practitioners worldwide – and the welfare of the general public as a whole – by providing complete expertise, professional development, technical assistance, advocacy and outreach.

Background:  Information received from multiple jurisdictions indicates the possibility of attacks targeting the telephone systems of public sector entities.  Dozens of such attacks have targeted the administrative PSAP lines (not the 911 emergency line).  The perpetrators of the attack have launched high volume of calls against the target network, tying up the system from receiving legitimate calls.  This type of attack is referred to as a TDoS or Telephony Denial of Service attack.  These attacks are ongoing.  Many similar attacks have occurred targeting various businesses and public entities, including the financial sector and other public emergency operations interests, including air ambulance, ambulance and hospital communications.

Scheme:  These recent TDoS attacks are part of an extortion scheme. This scheme starts with a phone call to an organization from an individual claiming to represent a collections company for payday loans.  The caller usually has a strong accent of some sort and asks to speak with a current or former employee concerning an outstanding debt.  Failing to get payment from an individual or organization, the perpetrator launches a TDoS attack.  The organization will be inundated with a continuous stream of calls for an unspecified, but lengthy period of time.  The attack can prevent both incoming and/or outgoing calls from being completed. It is speculated that government offices/emergency services are being “targeted” because of the necessity of functional phone lines.

What we know:

• The attacks resulted in enough volume to cause a roll over to the alternate facility.
• The attacks last for intermittent time periods over several hours.  They may stop for several hours, then resume.  Once attacked, the attacks can start randomly over weeks or months.
• The attacks followed a person with a heavy accent demanding payment of $5,000 from the company because of default by an employee who either no longer works at the PSAP or never did.

What we need from victims:

• Additional insight into the scope and impact of the event- specifically how many communications centers have been attacked is critical to identifying the true scope of this occurrence.
• In order to ensure situational awareness with our members and member agencies, it is critical that this information be disseminated to emergency communications centers, PSAP’s, government IT departments, and any related government agency with a vested interest in emergency communications continuity of operations.

Recommend the following:

• Targeted organizations should not pay the blackmail.
• Report all attacks to the FBI by logging onto the website www.ic3.gov
  • Ensure in the title of the report you use the keyword TDoS
  • Ensure that you identify yourself as a PSAP or Public Safety organization capture as much details as possible
    • Calls logs from “collection” call and TDoS
    • Time, date,  originating phone number, traffic characteristics
    • Call back number to the “collections”
    • Method of payment and account number where “collection” company requests debt to be paid
    • ANY information you can obtain about the caller, or his/her organization will be of tremendous assistance in this investigation and in preventing further attacks.
  • Contact your telephone service provider; they may be able to assist by blocking portions of the attack.
  • Should you have any questions please contact the National Coordinating Center for Communications at NCC@hq.dhs.gov or 703-235-5080.

NCCIC of the DHS-Office of Emergency Communications, is coordinating this response to the TDoS attacks with the cooperation of DHS – Office of Infrastructure Protection, Federal Communications Commission, the National Cyber and Forensics Training Alliance, the FBI-National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force in coordination with the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International, the National Emergency Numbers Association (NENA), Louisiana Fusion Center, Mansfield Police Department and telecommunications service providers.

2011 New Zealand Earthquake

By Julian D Kardos

On Feb. 22, 2011, a devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand only 5 km deep and almost directly under the city of Christchurch. Almost 200 people were killed, and thousands more were injured. Most of the destruction occurred in the center of the city where a quarter of all commercial buildings and thousands of homes were damaged to the point of demolition.

Computer simulations of similar quakes run prior to the actual disaster predicted a much higher death toll for Christchurch, New Zealand’s second most populous city. What the computer models didn’t take into account, however, was how remarkably well prepared the New Zealand public safety services were to continue functioning in the face of such a disaster.

The Country
Divided into two islands, New Zealand covers 270,000 square kilometers and is home to more than 4 million people. The national New Zealand Fire Service and New Zealand Police protect the residents and properties. New Zealand’s three Ambulance Communications Centres dispatch the country’s fleet of more than 600 ambulances, 250 rural doctors and nurses, more than 40 emergency helicopters, Coast Guard and other modes of response. They also coordinate patient transfer services for district health boards.¹ Prior to the 2007 unification of communications systems, Police and Fire had segmented the nation into three catchment areas, centered on Christchurch, Auckland and the capital city of Wellington.

New Zealand moved into the era of computer-aided dispatch (CAD) for both Police and Fire in the 1990s. However, each jurisdictional comm center operated different models of CAD systems that were capable of sharing information but not configured to give each center a nationwide view of emergency events without manual event transfers. Each facility had its own underlying database with dynamic backup. The biggest weakness in the design was the inability of dispatchers in one jurisdiction to help those in another during a widespread emergency event.

Nationalizing Emergency Communications
In 1996, the New Zealand Fire and Police services decided to run their individual emergency calltaking and dispatching functions from three separate comm centers, with a common CAD and telephony system, and using the Police radio network. Covering the entire country, the goal was to improve operational performance and efficiency. Until then, regional comm centers had lacked sufficient interoperability to allow continuous operations if one region had a catastrophe.

Once the decision was made to create the unified Police and Fire Communications and Resource Deployment (CARD) network, New Zealand selected Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., to implement its I/CAD product. New Zealand had already been operating Intergraph CAD systems since 1996. The I/CAD product was designed specifically to handle calltaking and dispatching for multiple public safety agencies with thousands of vehicles spread over a large geographic area. The implementation included a nationwide digital map capable of supporting planned GPS-based automatic vehicle location (AVL) inputs.

When creating a national communications network, the most important feature of the CAD is scalability. Under normal operating conditions, telecommunicators in each of the three comm centers view the event lists, call-outs and emergency vehicle movements only for their region. In times of crisis, though, the CAD enables supervisors to shift the coverage areas displayed on workstations, allowing communications personnel to zoom out to a nationwide view or focus on a single city, with dispatch functionality scaling appropriately.

In 2007, Police and Fire, which had been operating on a local area network (LAN), switched over to a wide area network (WAN), allowing a unified communications network with the same CAD, telephony and radio components—though New Zealand emergency communications still essentially operate as three independent regional centers in normal situations. The unified architecture and shared database enable the three regional facilities to expand or shrink their coverage areas on the fly if one suddenly finds itself overloaded with incoming emergency calls.

To ensure continuous availability of the I/CAD data following the move of CARD from the LAN to the WAN, Intergraph implemented the Oracle Data Guard database solution for management of real-time and historical event information on behalf of both Police and Fire. The primary database is located in Auckland, with backup servers placed nearly 500 km. away in Wellington. The Oracle technology keeps the two databases in sync to within seconds of each other.

“If the primary database goes down, the backup kicks in and continues delivering data to I/CAD within four minutes,” says Iain Lynn, Southern Communications Centre manager for New Zealand Fire Service. “Data Guard allows us to never totally go down.”

During the 2011 event, the two centers not affected by the quake assumed some calltaking and dispatch duties for the overwhelmed Christchurch facility by accessing its event list and viewing its deployment maps onscreen. Public safety officials credit the communications system’s ability to share information and functionality across the nation in real time as the event unfolded and the fact that none of the components failed as crucial factors in keeping the death toll relatively low.

“[The earthquake] proved the power of the virtual nationalized system,” says Lynn.

Virtualized Emergency Communications
In 1996, New Zealand established three joint public safety control rooms—one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch—to house Police and Fire dispatchers and calltakers under the same roofs, each with double-redundant power sources. Although all calltaking and dispatch terminals run off the same CAD system, their terminal interfaces have been customized for either Police or Fire functionality.

A nationwide fiber-optic line running north and south the length of New Zealand along a major railroad route provides the primary data communications link for the three comm centers. The cable loops back on itself repeatedly for diversion purposes in case of a break, the CARD network also maintains two backup data communications links, one of which is wireless.

Just prior to the earthquake, Police and Fire had started to implement a nationwide digital radio network for enhanced security. Police use it to dispatch cruisers by voice command, and officers in the field respond by voice to report their status, which the dispatchers note on the map display. Fire stations and vehicles rely on an encoded messaging system to receive call-out orders and update their status and locations automatically to the CAD display via radio tone signaling.

To support the scalable CAD, New Zealand also installed a nationwide Solidus 7 phone system for the comm centers. This system has the ability to equalize call volumes among the three facilities. Working in either an automatic or a manual mode, the system senses when too many calls are coming into one center and diverts them to available call takers in one of the other two control rooms.

The New Zealand Ambulance Service largely continues to use its own CAD system, but in 2009 it opted to participate in the CARD network by means of the Intergraph InterCAD product. This integration tool serves as a bridge between I/CAD and the third-party ambulance CAD. InterCAD enables event data sharing between the systems. It is currently configured for the Police, Fire and ambulance communications staffs to have the details of mutual response events posted in text format on their display screens so that each agency has the incident on screen and can take appropriate actions.

Surviving a Direct Hit
In the years leading up to the 2011 earthquake, New Zealand experienced thousands of tremors and temblors; the invaluable lessons learned  were integrated into the Business Continuity Plans (BCP) maintained and practiced weekly by Police and Fire personnel. When the major quake struck Christchurch during the noon hour on a Tuesday, it took the Southern Communications Centre less than eight minutes to assess the situation and enact the appropriate contingency plan.

“The comm center looked like a bomb site—things that weren’t strapped down came crashing down,” says Kieran Kortegast, manager of the Police Southern Communications Centre. “The great thing was our Intergraph system and all our servers kept on running, and our staff were unhurt and able to keep working.”

A quick assessment revealed that the Christchurch Central Police station where the Southern Communications Centre is located had sustained only cosmetic damage and  the Police and Fire CAD, phone and radio systems in Christchurch were all still functioning. In addition, the primary communications link to the CAD database in Auckland was intact.

Within minutes, the volume of incoming calls tripled, and their geographic distribution confirmed the Christchurch Metropolitan District was the hardest hit. The local ambulance service, however, had lost its CAD, and the New Zealand Civil Defence Agency had lost its ability to communicate with Police and Fire in Christchurch.

“We learned after an earlier quake on Sept. 4, 2010, that the center with all the damage should divest the bulk of its work to the other centers, to allow concentration on the rescue and recovery operation,” says Lynn.

Shifting all other calltaking and dispatching responsibilities in the CAD to the Wellington and Auckland centers allowed Southern Communications Centre operators to focus solely on emergency response within the Christchurch Metropolitan District. For Police, this also included sending some dispatch services under the BCP to a few 24/7 district police stations as fallback sites. Because they had practiced repeatedly in the past, the telecommunicators in Northern Communications Centre and Central Communications Centre and at the fallback sites were able to step in seamlessly and responded to events as easily as if they were sitting in the Christchurch center.

Even with the suburban and rural calls diverted, however, the Christchurch workload was significant. Telecommunicators in that control room could triage calls and assign them to appropriate Police and Fire crews, but they also found themselves tracking ambulance requests manually and communicating with Civil Defence via runners. With its communications facilities fully operational, the Christchurch center became the hub of response activities in the city.

“We were the crucial link in keeping the emergency rescue and response operations running,” says Kortegast.

Under normal conditions, the Police Service operates three digital voice radio channels in Canterbury, the district surrounding Christchurch. In the aftermath of the quake, Police Southern Communications Centre telecommunicators continued to run these radio channels, and an extra channel was activated in Christchurch to prevent voice traffic from overloading the system. Due to the workload, each channel was shared by two Police dispatchers in the center.

A tense moment came late in the evening on Feb. 22, when the comm center was informed that both backup CAD server links had been destroyed in the quake. The surviving primary link, a fiber-optic cable, was deemed tenuous at best because a large building above it was nearing collapse. Remarkably, the building held out until the telecommunications company could reroute the lines the next day.

“Our business continuity plan even accounted for losing all three CAD server links,” says Lynn. “We would have run the CAD [from] our training server.”

In the hours after the earthquake, Police and Fire in the stricken area each had anywhere from six to 24 calltakers and dispatchers in Southern Communications Centre triaging about 1,200 emergency calls and deploying personnel through the nationalized CAD. Within 18 hours, rescue vehicles and crews from other districts arrived inChristchurchto assist with event response. From that point, the number of pending events began to decrease.

“In most of these situations, the best we can do is answer the calls,” says Kortegast, “but we actually achieved our target service levels [during the quake and its aftermath].”

Community Reassurance
Looking back on the 2011 earthquake, Lynn and Kortegast remain impressed with two factors. First, the public safety personnel in the Christchurch comm center performed their duties professionally and with dedication, putting others before themselves. Second, they were amazed that all critical communications infrastructure withstood the shaking of the quake. Kortegast believes this fact goes beyond proving the value of a nationalized CAD so that there is real-time resilience across the entire country.

“This is where the public trust and confidence in emergency services came very strongly to the fore. Our systems and platforms kept on running, and we kept on running as well,” Kortegast says.

Julian D. Kardos is the Intergraph Corp. account  manager for the New Zealand Police and New Zealand Fire Service.

References
1. Comms Centre Technology: www.111.govt.nz/technology/no_of_calls_ambulance.html

This article originally appeared in April 2012 Public Safety Communications.

This is the perfect opportunity for CAD providers, their management and technical staff, to understand the details surrounding ASAP. The course is designed to provide complete information to enable CAD providers the build of a successful ASAP interface between their PSAP customers and alarm monitoring companies.

During this course, presented by APCO staff and ASAP SMEs, attendees will learn:

• An overview of the ASAP project
• Review of the schema
• Message types sent by the alarm monitoring companies & PSAPs
• Review of actual ASAP XML messages
• Best practices
• Overview of the current transport layer & the role of the Message Broker
• Project status: Operational alarm companies & states

The course will be conducted on Sunday, Aug. 19, 2012, from 8 a.m. – noon. Registration for the course will begin on July 2. An organization may register and send up to five staff members. The cost of the course has been significantly discounted.

In addition to the preconference course, APCO also offers technical assistance to CAD providers on site at the company’s location. The content is similar to the course being offered in August, but with a full-day duration operating at a slower pace.

For more information, visit the conference website at http://www.apco2012.org/program/pre-conference-courses.html or e-mail asap@apcointl.org.

About the Author

Bill Hobgood is a project manager for the city of Richmond’s DIT public safety team with 40 years of experience in public safety. He is also a project coordinator for APCO’s Comm Center & 9-1-1 Services Department and a subject matter expert on the ASAP Project. Contact Bill via e-mail at asap@apcointl.org.