District Looks to Lead the Way in Crisis Technology
Pilot System Lets Safety Officials Communicate Even When Other Networks Fail
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 16, 2007; DZ01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/15/AR2007081500851_pf.html
On Sept. 11, 2001, the cellphone network in the Washington area was quickly
overloaded as frantic residents dialed relatives and friends. Now, the
District is trying to develop a high-tech wireless network for public
safety officials, allowing them to talk and send live video and images even
if private networks are bogged down.
D.C. officials say they hope to speed the system's development with a new
$12 million grant from the federal government to improve emergency
communications.
"Unlike 9/11, when all of the systems went down . . . we would have this
network strictly for public safety folks," said Darrell L. Darnell, the
District's homeland security director.
A pilot of the system has been running in the District for two years. Known
as the Wireless Accelerated Responder Network (WARN), it was pronounced a
success by the U.S. Commerce Department recently, despite a few problems.
"Our nation's capital has the potential to be the template for satisfying
the nation's public safety broadband needs," said Commerce Secretary Carlos
M. Gutierrez.
The idea for the system developed after the Sept. 11 attacks. District
officials were working to upgrade the radio network used by police and
firefighters, and they began to ponder what equipment would be needed next.
"If you just sit back as a technologist and look at it, you can see the
industry and communications are going in the way of data becoming more and
more important," said Robert LeGrande II, the city's chief technology
officer. "We anticipated at that time [that] just like we had these voice
networks, we were going to need these data networks."
The District used $2.8 million from a federal grant to start building the
next new thing: a high-speed broadband wireless network just for law
enforcement and emergency workers. It was aimed at allowing such workers to
send and download big chunks of data, such as real-time video, blueprints
of buildings, mug shots, fingerprints and maps of city fire hydrants.
Communications towers were set up throughout the city; 200 users were given
subscriber devices.
The system went online just before President Bush's second inauguration, in
2005. One of the experiments that day involved attaching a camera to a
vehicle in the presidential motorcade, LeGrande said. It beamed back video
over the WARN system, allowing the Secret Service to monitor the cars from
an operations center.
"From a security standpoint, it was more reliable" than using a commercial
network, LeGrande said. And, in a crisis, other networks might have slowed,
he said.
The WARN system hasn't been utilized just for national security events.
Federal and local officials have used it to monitor Fourth of July crowds
in downtown Washington. Emergency workers turned to the system during the
mercury spill at Cardozo Senior High School in Northwest in 2005.
U.S. Park Police officers have used the system to check criminal databases
from the field to determine whether individuals they stopped had
outstanding arrest warrants, officials said.
"WARN was able to satisfy almost all expectations," the Commerce Department
report said.
But not all.
On Inauguration Day, even the WARN system became overloaded, "bringing into
question the adequacy of a single broadband channel for a city the size of
the District," the report said.
Still, the system has been so useful that local and state governments in
the Washington area are spending millions of dollars in federal homeland
security grants to try to expand it regionally. As for the District,
officials are hoping to add users and eventually incorporate voice and data
transmission.
Christopher Geldart, the Homeland Security Department coordinator for the
Washington area, said the WARN system was an example of the next stage in
emergency communications.
Tragedies such as the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina exposed
serious flaws in the ability of police and firefighters to talk to each
other. Such basic problems have been largely solved in the Washington area,
which got top marks in a report card on emergency communications issued by
Homeland Security in January.
But the region still faces a daunting task when it comes to sharing
criminal records and other information.
"There's multiple layers to this thing. It's not just the fireman talking
to the cop on the radio. It's also how do we share data, how do we share
information in a common way," Geldart said.
"We are much better off today than we were at 9/11," he said. "However,
there's still a long way to go."
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George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
