Video Sharing Needed for Emergency Response
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By Stew Magnuson and Matthew Rusling
Since 9/11, the nation has tried to move closer to a world where all first responders, the military and other government agencies can communicate on one radio system.
While that dream has yet to be fully achieved, another challenge is looming. These myriad organizations can’t see what everyone is seeing.
Millions of dollars have been spent on high-tech live video cameras in cities all over the United States, but they are not always worth the price, said David Fowler, senior vice president of marketing at VidSys.
“No two video systems out there today speak the same language,” he said at the GovSec conference.
“You can spend millions of dollars to put in video equipment and get very little value out of it,” he said.
One notable example was the “Miracle on the Hudson” when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger glided his damaged passenger aircraft to a safe river landing in New York Jan. 15.
The city’s joint transportation management center was able to watch the near disaster unfold live, but was not able to transmit the video feed to other agencies such as the fire department and Coast Guard.
This requires organizations to work together — to actually want to share their images with others — and that isn’t always the case, he said.
One key difference between video and voice is that those who are speaking into the radio can control what kind of information they want to pass along.
Russell Burleson, public safety architect at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, said some jurisdictions have deliberately picked systems they knew others didn’t use so they didn’t have to share the information. Burleson declined to elaborate but said this happened in years past, before 9/11.
New York City is the furthest along in information-sharing efforts. The aforementioned joint transportation management center in Long Island City is melding the video feeds from the New York state and city Departments of Transportation, New York Police Department and Federal Highway Administration in an effort to coordinate emergency responses on the metropolis’ roads. The fire department might join the center soon, he said.