In the early 1990s, a series of railroad and highway hazmat incidents turned into bigger disasters than they would have if emergency responders had possessed more information about the chemicals they were facing and what they should do.

“There were several incidents that either ended up having unnecessary evacuations because firefighters didn't know what they were dealing with or there were unknown chemicals escaping into the air,” recalls Daniel M. Collins, president of Operation Respond Institute Inc. “There were incidents where people got hurt, responders got hurt, and there were some incidents where people actually got killed.”

Among the solutions decided on by Congress was the creation of a national database containing information about all hazardous materials moving through the rail and highway systems. In the event of a railroad or truck accident, emergency responders could refer to the live database for information from the transportation industry on what was involved.

But after an investigation, the National Academy of Sciences suggested this might not be the best way to go. That plan would impose an economic burden on railroad and trucking companies and would actually reinvent the wheel, as these companies already had the information in their own databases. All that was really needed was an entity to develop secure mechanisms to retrieve data from the transportation industry and deliver it to fire and police in a format they could use readily in an emergency.

Thus, Operation Respond Institute Inc., a not-for-profit public/private partnership, was founded in 1995 from a Federal Railroad Administration initiative. Over the years, thanks to funding from the Department of Transportation and more recently from the Department of Homeland Security, Operation Respond has built the technical avenues for railroad, trucking and maritime companies to share life-saving information about what's moving through their systems in real-time with emergency responders across the North America.

Based in Washington, D.C., Operation Respond's international steering committee brings together representatives of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Volunteer Fire Council and the International Union of Police Associations with Amtrak, CSX Transportation, the Association of American Railroads, the American Trucking Associations, and federal entities such as the Federal Transit Administration and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Software tool

The principal product of Operation Respond's partnership is OREIS, a software tool providing information from the railroad and trucking industry to help responders know precisely what they're dealing with in a transportation emergency.

The latest version, OREIS 6.0, was mailed to some 4,500 sites across the United States, Canada and Mexico and is installed already. With good saturation of fire, law enforcement and dispatch centers in major metropolitan areas and locations with railroad and trucking hubs, says Collins, the organization is now turning its attention to getting more responders from rural America on board.

OREIS, which is short for Operation Respond Emergency Information System, provides information in real-time about the hazmat contents of rail cars and motor carrier trailers involved in accidents. The system, which imports information from the transportation industry about contents in transit, also offers response guidance for approaching specific hazardous materials involved in accidents, as well as schematics of the cars or tank trucks involved.

Every major freight railroad in the United States and Canada participates in OREIS, including the recently added Alaska Railroad. Amtrak, VIA Rail Canada, several large commuter rail operators and some short-line railroads are in the system.

For the trucking industry, Operation Respond is working on integrations with firms such as Qualcomm Inc., the leading provider of a satellite-based vehicle tracking systems for the trucking industry. Qualcomm currently monitors about 300,000 trucks moving across the roadways every day, Collins says, serving about 75% of the long-haul trucking market. Operation Respond and Qualcomm are working on a strategic alliance to integrate these capabilities. This partnership recently has been expanded to include a promising technology developed by General Dynamics that can alert responders of a truck incident through an automatic crash-notification system.

OREIS is by no means intended to replace the placarding system used to identify the hazardous materials contained in railcars and trucks, Collins emphasizes. Because first responders need multiple verifications of what they're dealing with to organize their response, the software provides placard and UN ID guides, as well as the Coast Guard's CHRIS Database, American Railroad's Chemical List and NIOSH's Target Organs Guide.

OREIS users also become part of a network operated by the Emergency Services Information Network Corp. that allows them to receive emergency notifications, alerts and messages via e-mail from federal and local governments, transportation carriers, and Operation Respond.

New features

OREIS 6.0 has beefed-up security measures to make sure information about hazardous materials doesn't fall into the wrong hands. V-One, the company that provides a secure virtual private network for the FBI, now provides the same services for Operation Respond and OREIS downloads to first responder organizations.

Other new features include new biochem and weapons of mass destruction databases. “We've also improved the schematics from the passenger-carrying railroad companies to develop what I would call more law enforcement — specific applications,” Collins says.

The organization is working to incorporate several new capabilities in the software, according to Dr. James W. Boone, Operation Respond executive vice president. GIS street mapping and high-resolution overhead imagery are being overlaid with railroad mileposts and other landmarks to help responders pinpoint the exact location of a train in distress and identify the best route to it.

“Working together with Amtrak, a project funded by DHS is getting the 457-mile Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C, to Boston, through New York, online with these enhanced street maps and images before the Republican and Democratic national conventions,” Boone says. “We will make all this available to DHS, Amtrak Police and key response agencies along the northeast corridor in time for the conventions. We are grateful that the Department of Homeland Security is providing funding to help us increase the scope and importance of the whole project.”

Once the Northeast Corridor is complete, Operation Respond would like to work with the Association of American Railroads and DHS to expand the project to include heavily traveled railroad segments throughout the United States and Canada.

In addition to covering railroads and highways, Operation Respond is under a Congressional mandate to expand its capabilities to port operations for homeland security purposes, and the process of linking and importing this information has begun. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey uploads information to Operation Respond's server every 30 minutes.

“It's a lot of information,” says Collins. “We're working to decipher what's important and what isn't and how it should be presented on a screen when an incident happens. We're in the design phase of that right now.” As more information from the maritime industry is integrated, schematics of cruise ships, ferry boats and cargo vessels will be delivered to emergency responders over OREIS.

In the near future, OREIS is working to also deliver its information in multiple formats, including transmissions via cell phone and other wireless devices.

Tool against terror

The messaging and alert system plays an important role in OREIS' future because it connects the railroad, trucking and port authorities to fire, law enforcement and dispatch centers across North America over a secure communications system.

Last year, when the FBI received a credible threat that terrorists were targeting railroad yards and bridges, that information went out as an alert through the OREIS network, says Collins. “We sent out messages, working with the Association of American Railroads, to our network of responders telling them that, over the next 72 hours, they needed to raise their level of concern about railroad yards and bridges. Our responders did in fact do that; they sent out more patrols, they heightened their level of concern about those railroad facilities.”

The same system might also alert first responders of a hijacked truck carrying a hazardous material, notes Boone. “In a situation like that where you might have a rapidly moving vehicle, and you need to alert people downstream that something is coming at them, one thing that is often forgotten is that is not only a law enforcement matter,” he says. “If there are hazardous materials involved, you also need to contemporaneously notify people with hazmat capability. An advantage of our system, as a network of first responders, is that it does not discriminate between types of responders…. Every time there's a hazmat incident, it's a multi-agency response; everybody has to be involved.”

A great deal of credit is due to companies in shipping and transportation, which have opened their doors to provide better information to emergency responders. “They know what's in their trucks and they know what's in their tank cars, and they're confident enough in Operation Respond to allow us to be the means to provide that information to police and firefighters. We just become a conduit to do that, and we do it in a secure fashion so that the wrong people can't get their hands on this data,” says Collins.

Reaching rural America

Until now, Operation Respond has focused primarily on getting OREIS installed in urban areas, particularly those with big railyards and trucking hubs. But railroad and trucking accidents occur everywhere in America. Rural departments need this tool, too.

The IAFC, which placed OREIS on its priority list of technologies needed by fire departments and lobbied Congress for funding from DOT to distribute OREIS for free to the emergency response community, is now working to help get more rural communities into the program.

Operation Respond and the IAFC launched a campaign in June to reach out to rural fire chiefs at the Center for Rural Development in Somerset, Ky. Fire chiefs from 42 counties in eastern Kentucky are working on the project to improve its service to rural responders. “They're reviewing all that we do and giving us input as to what we can do better to help rural responders,” Collins says, “both in terms of dealing with these incidents and also from a security point of view.”

The software is available to fire, rescue, EMS and law enforcement organizations, but the organization must verify that the people who have access to OREIS have had a background check. Because background checks aren't always common procedure in fire departments, one approach to overcome the problem is to have the software installed in 911 centers, which then pass the information via radio or phone to first responders as they're being dispatched.

But if your department has background-check capability, it can request its own set of the software. “If they have a hazmat vehicle or if they have a regional hazmat vehicle, it can be installed on it, because I know that in a lot of these areas they share things,” says Collins.

The quality and volume of data flowing to Operation Respond and to OREIS from railroad, trucking and the maritime industry continues to increase every day. These companies realize that providing better information makes a better emergency response and a safer one for the people arriving on scene.

“The last thing that anybody wants is for the first responder to be the first victim,” Boone says. “As a result, there's a common bond between the employees of these companies and the fire and rescue people. That common bond is that they return home safely.”

OREIS Software Feature Set

The Operation Respond Institute estimates that of the 4,500 organizations which currently have OREIS software installed, about 75% are in fire, police, rescue or dispatch centers, and 25% are installed on laptops in command vehicles and hazmat trucks. These installations currently network an estimated 500,000 fire, police and rescuers across North America.

The New Orleans Fire Department has been using OREIS for four years. The software is installed on desktops and laptops in the field, according to Capt. Don Birou of the department's special operations team. Comparing it to other software programs available for hazmat response, Birou says two aspects of OREIS are unique.

The detailed schematics and information about specific railroad, freight cars, Amtrak passenger cars and locomotives it provides are invaluable to rescuers arriving on scene, he says. “In locomotives, for example, it gives you not only the diagram of it, but detail about how much fuel that particular locomotive has, what kind of voltage it may be running and so on. There's a great deal of detail that comes with the program, and having that detail is invaluable, especially when you're responding to a derailment in an isolated location,” says Birou.

The schematics can be used for preplanning and training as well. He notes that New Orleans' Police Department SWAT teams and bomb technicians also tap into OREIS. In the event of a hostage situation or terrorist incident in the rail system, they can study the diagrams about specific railroad cars to plan their entry. “They can also preplan and train off those diagrams for that particular kind of incident,” he says.

Also unique is the ability OREIS provides for rescuers to directly connect to the mainframe computers of railroad companies and download information on the specific cars or engines involved in the incident. “It will immediately bring back the data on that railcar, for that day and time — where it was en route to, where it was coming from, what's in that railcar, what kinds of chemicals and whether it's empty or loaded,” says Birou. “It provides a lot of instant data on a lot of good things that you can use very quickly and not have to worry, if it's three o'clock on Christmas morning, about making a phone call to the railroad and getting someone who might not be able to provide that information right away.”

Operation Respond hopes to reach 8,000 installations by the end of the year. With the excitement from Version 6.0, and support from such organizations as the International Association of Fire Chiefs and the Department of Homeland Security, it's a good bet it will get there.

For More Info

Information on installing and training for first responders is included on the OREIS software. A tutorial will be available at www.oreis.org.

Operation Respond Institute Inc.
401 Constitution Ave. N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002
202-548-0935; oreis@erols.com