The events of Sept. 11, 2001, undeniably changed the world. Nowhere is this truer than in the little corner of it known as the New York City Fire Department. Just ask FDNY Chief Salvatore Cassano, a 40-year department veteran who no longer is physically present at incidents — a post-9/11 mandate after the FDNY lost 21 chiefs at the Twin Towers.

"We no longer send our top echelon to the scene," Cassano says. "It's hard for me because I've been doing this for so many years and now we have to take a different approach. But it's a much more sensible approach."

State-of-the-art technology is somewhat easing Cassano's angst. Today, he runs the FDNY remotely from its fire department operations center (FDOC) in Brooklyn. From there, the chief oversees the bureau of operations for fire and EMS, which oversees communications, fire prevention, training and safety, among other disciplines. He's also the guy who meets with high-level city officials to procure funding.

"I've built up a level of trust with city officials," he says. "So when I ask for money for new projects, they take me seriously and know it's important."

It took three years and funding from both the city ($3 million) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ($14 million) to upgrade the FDOC. The technology upgrades were a result of recommendations made in the McKinsey Report, which provided a comprehensive review of fire department operations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They have enabled the FDNY to improve interoperable communications with other city agencies, including the police department, office of emergency management and department of transportation. In addition, the FDOC now lets senior fire commanders manage multiple, large-scale incidents across the city — and monitor operations at its 198 engine and 143 ladder companies — from a single, centralized, remote location.

The center is used for both day-to-day operations and command-and-control for large-scale emergency incidents. For daily operations, it operates as the communications hub for all incident data. Cassano explained that firefighters, officers and apparatus are deployed via several brick-and-mortar dispatch centers located in each of the city's five boroughs. Personnel usually handle 1,200 to 1,300 calls daily. In addition, the FDOC receives calls from an emergency medical dispatch center located in Brooklyn, which receives approximately 3,330 calls daily.

Cassano notes that in the next eight months, personnel from all of the city's boroughs will be moved to a single public-safety answering point. In addition, a second PSAP site will be used as a backup center. "But in the meantime, before that is built, we are going to have a backup communications office in the Bronx and in Queens," he says.

The FDOC is divided into several areas. It includes an emergency operations center that supervises daily responses; an incident support center that is used for large-scale disasters; and two divisible command center conference rooms. During larger emergencies, the joint information center located in the FDOC is used to draft and disseminate tips and information to the public.

All areas are separated by transparent glass that can be switched to appear opaque for privacy during emergency response meetings. Cassano says the private areas were set up as secure locations where high-level officials with top-secret clearance can meet and be in contact with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies.

Cassano notes that New York City always will be a target for terrorism. In his heart, he hopes the city won't suffer another terrorist attack. But if it does, "we will be ready," he says.

Data capture

The operations center houses secure phone lines and computers, as well a wall-mounted, curved-screen panel where commanders view video and other data. In addition, the FDNY recently armed its fleet of vehicles with an automatic vehicle-location system that tracks every apparatus and ambulance. All data are displayed across the screen panel using GIS mapping software.

Moreover, the department now has the ability — through an agreement with the NYPD — to place fire officers aboard police helicopters so they can see all sides of a building. Also, information can be sent to those onboard, such as pertinent building violations and any special precautions related to the site.

"We had a very small operations center and had very little capabilities, but now we are extremely proud of what we've built, including the capability to monitor the [police department] and media helicopters, subway overlays, information from the building department, the electric company, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and more," Cassano says.

Capturing audio is another priority at the FDOC. In fact, every radio transmission and telephone call that comes into the center is recorded and able to be played back immediately. One of the systems being used was developed by NICE Systems. Chris Wooten, president of the company's security division, says a logging-and-recording system has been implemented at the FDNY. Wooten says the FDNY's move to implement such a system was done to adhere to the city's emergency communications transformation program. The program is a multi-year, multi-agency initiative that was implemented to modernize virtually all aspects of New York's emergency 911 systems.

The FDNY's recording system is one of the company's most sophisticated deployments, Wooten says.

"Like anything done in New York, the project is usually bigger and more complex than most," he says. "We deployed our application that gives the fire department access to bring in incident audio, video, cell phone pictures, reports, documents [and] digital pictures about the incident, all under a single, unified incident-management application."

The logging-and-recording system is used to capture incident audio from wireline and wireless 911 calls, as well as the emergency call boxes wired throughout the city that connect to the local firehouse. Servers are both onsite and offsite for redundancy purposes. The FDOC and the dispatch centers located in the five boroughs all are connected to the system. Wooten says the system captures audio data twice, first on an onsite system at each of the dispatch centers and then also on a server back at headquarters.

"Archived information is saved to high-density tape that was developed to last up to 20 years," Wooten says.

All of the aforementioned upgrades at the FDOC paid off when U.S. Airways Flight 54 landed in the Hudson River in January, Cassano says. In the aftermath, Washington officials called New York command and control to determine whether the event was terrorism-based. Officers on the city's Joint Terrorism Task Force dispelled the notion. Cassano was working out of the FDOC. He had a visual of the plane floating on the river from media reports, as well as via a helicopter view. He was in contact with the FAA and area hospitals. At the same time, he communicated all data via radio to his operations chief who was 10 miles away.

Cassano also instructed a team to go to the planning section of the command center to start a database of victims, which identified the hospital to which they were transported and details about their injuries.

"I had a handle on what was going on much sooner, much more accurately, then anyone on the scene," he says. "We had that information before anyone else because of our EMS and our contact with all of the hospitals. It was the vast amount of information received and managed at the center that helped me and my team to seamlessly manage the incident."

Across the country

New York is just one example of how EOCs have evolved since 9/11. Deputy Chief Lindsey Plummer oversees the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department's communications center, which is at the heart of the Miami-Dade emergency operations center. The department is staffed by more than 2,550 employees and dispatches 64 fire-rescue stations within unincorporated Miami-Dade County that protect 1,883 square miles.

The fire department shares space at the Miami-Dade 911 center with the police department and civilian call-takers. However, firefighters are responsible for dispatching all the apparatus and related resources for fire calls. Data currently are viewed on computer-aided dispatch systems. The department hopes to one day transfer its data over higher-speed broadband systems, Plummer says.

"Right now, we looked at the technology and understand what it can do and how we can best use it," he says. "We just don't have the money."

If there is a major event, Plummer says command groups from across public-safety agencies meet at headquarters. They formulate the direction of the resources and formulate a plan for all public-safety roles. The commanders have phone lines connected to Washington, D.C., so they can be in constant contact with federal authorities should a major national event happen.

Capturing data is crucial to the fire department's operations, Plummer says. The department recently installed NICE Inform, a multimedia incident-information-management solution to capture and seamlessly synch voice and video with other multimedia information for comprehensive incident reconstruction — the same logging-and-recording software used by the FDNY.

Wooten says all radio traffic and incoming lines at the MDFR are recorded via the company's platform, adding that the department's dispatch center handles close to a quarter-million emergency calls each year to dispatch fire rescue apparatus and aero-medical transport services. He says the NICE solution both records and manages 911 and radio emergency communications in the dispatch center as well as VoIP administrative phone lines.

"Different fire departments operate differently, some field phone calls directly, some calls come straight from 911 and some have a hybrid approach," Wooten says. "We capture the telephony and … radio communications, and the incident-management application lets them reconstruct the [event] and investigate — and package as evidence — that data."

The solution replaced an outdated system, making it easier for MDFR to process public-records requests, and reconstruct and retrieve emergency call scenarios for training purposes, Wooten says. Its key feature is to give fire chiefs the ability to bring in additional incident information when investigating the event.

"A lot of fire departments are starting to bring video on trucks, so with our solution you can listen to the call, the incident radio and also [view] video from a fixed or mobile camera — all linked together so when they go back to do forensics they can actually get the 360° view of the incident," he says.

FDNY Citywide Incidents

	Number of Incidents	Average Response Time
Structural Fires	26,862	4:12
Non-Structural Fires	17,192	4:40
Non-Fire Emergencies	191,926	5:01
Medical Emergencies	211,776	4:17
Malicious/False Alarms	25,579	4:19

Chicago's EOC Upgrade

Chicago officials upgraded its computer-aided dispatch system that coordinates 911 calls. One of the most groundbreaking elements of the upgrade is the integration of the Operation Virtual Shield (OVS) video-surveillance camera network into each CAD workstation at the city's emergency operation centers, says Jim Argiropoulous, first deputy of the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) division that oversees the OVS network.

Argiropoulous says that when a 911 call enters the system, the CAD system scans the OEMC network to find any camera within 150 feet of the address of the call. Within seconds, real-time video data is accessed through the OEMC server and the camera location appears on the call taker's screen via a mapping system. Call-takers can pan/title/zoom the camera to capture additional details about the incident, such as suspect identification. If a 911 call originates from a landline or cellular telephone, the phone number and location of the call, including building map and vital information of the surrounding area, appears on the call-taker's map screen as well.

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