By Harry Markley, Senior Law Enforcement Advisor, First Responder Network Authority
Many of us know exactly where we were and what we were doing when the 9/11 attacks happened. I was commander of the SWAT team for the Phoenix Police Department, and the news came early morning in our local time zone. I jumped in my vehicle and drove straight to work, not knowing when, where, or if the next attacks would happen.
Beginning that day and for many weeks that followed, my fellow officers and I worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week to stay in front of the threat. We monitored Arizona’s critical infrastructure, nuclear station, and power supply.
Jeff Johnson says 9/11 shed light on the flaws in communications systems used by the nation’s first responders.
When Jeff Johnson watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center on live television from his office at the Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue in Aloha 20 years ago, he wondered if it was going to be another Pearl Harbor.
“Like so many of us in America, I just got out of my chair and said, ‘That’s no accident. Someone intended to do that,'” the former TVF&R chief said.
One month later, Johnson was called to New York City to help with the process of replacing the 343 firefighters lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It is not uncommon for TVF&R personnel to be called to respond to national disasters like this.
When Johnson arrived, he was struck by how empty the city was. He also remembers how the community treated surrounding fire stations like shrines, with lost crew members’ belongings remaining untouched, just as they were the day they left the station on that tragic day…
Working at a 911 call center is not for the faint of heart. Soon you could be put into a situation that can actually mean life and death. With rigorous education and strong instructions, these dispatch hubs can enable emergency personnel to respond incredibly fast to each incoming call. Here are some of the ins and outs you may not have known about operating the 911 Contact Center.
Appropriate training
The 911 Call Center is different from standard customer service operations. Calls need to be processed quickly, but it takes time to get all the information needed to provide them to emergency personnel. In such cases, the live call may be disconnected or something may happen in the scene where the information is interrupted.With Phone number search, The call operator can attempt to reconnect with the caller. Advanced technology can also use GPS location to identify the origin of a call if it is coming from a mobile phone instead of a landline…
The Quell Foundation will host the 9/11 Ride of Hope as a peleton of 20 cyclists will travel from New York City, N.Y. to Arlington, V.A., during the week leading up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attack.
The 5-day event will kick off from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum on Tuesday, September 7, and conclude in Arlington on Saturday. The group will include active, retired, and surviving family members of first responders, many of whom responded to the horrific events of September 11, 2001.
Cycling 225 miles, this journey seeks to bring greater awareness and understanding to the long-term impact and emotional toll our nation’s first responders experience through compounded daily trauma. The Ride of Hope also aims to educate, inspire, and empower first responders to recognize mental health crisis warning signs amongst their own.
Each mile of the journey will pay respect to those who lost their lives and demonstrate The Foundation’s commitment to the mental health of our nation’s First Responder, Emergency Response, Government Agencies, and Military communities.
“The women and men of our nation’s first responder community are more likely to die by suicide than in the line-of-duty. These Americans who have dedicated their life to protecting, and saving ours, are taking their own at unprecedented rates,” said Kevin M. Lynch, CEO and President of The Quell Foundation. “The deteriorating mental health of our country’s first responders is at a critical point. On this, the twentieth anniversary of these tragic events, it is time we take care of the heroes who are there for us.”
Funds from the 9/11 Ride of Hope will support the continued development and implementation of The Foundation’s first responder mental health preparedness and training program.
How the Nation’s Most Important Wireless Network was Born
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Chief Chuck Dowd pulled up to the security gate at the New York City 9-1-1 Center where he was commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s communications division. An officer told him that a small plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center buildings. While the news concerned him, he had no idea what he was about to walk into.
“I went into the 9-1-1 Center and the place was a madhouse,” Dowd said. “As you can imagine, the calls were coming in from everywhere and they were horrific. Our folks were talking to people in the buildings who they knew were not going to get out alive. It was a terrible time.”
Meanwhile, at the scene, first responders were racing into the buildings in an attempt to rescue those trapped inside. With police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS) all converging on the towers at once, coordinating communications quickly became challenging, if not impossible.
“The ability to share information via radio between the NYPD and the FDNY wasn’t there because we were using two different radio systems,” Dowd said. “It was a stark reminder of just how bad things were that day.” As the news spread and the rest of the country came to grips with what was happening, first responders from other states headed to New York and Washington, D.C. While their assistance was welcomed, their presence further complicated the communications conundrum.
“People were writing notes on pieces of paper and running them around Ground Zero and the Pentagon,” said Chief Jeff Johnson, former president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. “You had agencies trying to cross the river to come to Manhattan and they all worked on different land-mobile-radio systems, none of which were designed to interoperate with each other.”
In the years to follow, Johnson joined Dowd and a host of others to play pivotal roles in solving the public safety communications issues that 9/11 exposed. In 2004, Ed Parkinson was working as an aide for U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY). In this role, he worked with constituents to champion causes in support of issues backed by the congressman. One such constituent group included Johnson and Dowd and came to be known as the Public Safety Alliance. The Alliance approached the legislator’s office with the idea of securing a dedicated block of spectrum — the scarce airwaves that wireless communications travel over — for dedicated use by the public safety community.
“It was the first time that we got everybody in public safety on the same page on one effort,” Dowd said. “That had never happened before. We were laser-focused on acquiring that spectrum and advocating for that spectrum in Washington. And it was a tough road.”
Rep. King stepped up as an early advocate and drafted the initial legislation to secure a prime block of spectrum, now known as Band 14, for public safety use. Specifically, the spectrum would give first responders the ability to not only communicate with each other and share data across departments and jurisdictions, but also to get priority and preemption over all other traffic using the airwaves. While 9/11 served as an impetus for the effort, with the need for an improved public safety communications system cited in the Congressional 9/11 Commission Report, communications failures had long been an issue for first responders across the country. From spotty cellular coverage in rural areas to saturated bandwidth in the midst of wildfires and emergencies in concentrated areas, the inability to communicate cost lives.
While Congress did not take action on the initial bill, it served as a critical catalyst for the initiative. The Alliance persisted and secured bipartisan support from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and John McCain (R-AZ), as well as other legislators. Still, the Alliance faced stiff opposition from those who felt the spectrum was too valuable an asset and could be sold to help pay down the federal deficit. But eventually, the Alliance earned support from then-Vice President Joe Biden, which was essential in getting the Obama administration on board.
“The Vice President listened to our arguments and said, ‘I can think of nothing more important than getting public safety the communications tools they need. I will get this done.’ And he kept his word,” recalls Johnson.
Then, after years of sending letters, showing up to meetings and events in uniform and lobbying legislators, Mother Nature fatefully intervened to further help the Alliance prove its point.
We had been making this case up on the Hill and people just didn’t get it,” said Chris Moore, another key member of the Alliance who served as the San Jose police chief until his retirement in 2013. “Then, in 2011, we had a big earthquake on the East Coast, and the people in D.C. thought a bomb had gone off. Hill staffers tried to make calls and couldn’t because the cellular networks were saturated. All of a sudden, the case we were making was demonstrated right in front of their own eyes, impacting them directly.”
And in Feb. 2012, Congress created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet Authority) as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act.
The law allocated 20 MHz of spectrum and $7 billion for the FirstNet Authority to build, operate and maintain a nationwide broadband network dedicated to first responders.
The FirstNet Authority spent years consulting with federal, state, tribal and local public safety entities to determine specifically what they needed in their network. And in 2017, the federal government selected AT&T to bring the network to life through a unique 25-year public-private partnership.
Today, FirstNet® covers 2.71 million square miles across 50 states, five territories and D.C. with more than 17,000 public safety agencies and organizations — representing over 2.5 million connections — on the network. Understanding the importance of public safety’s communications needs, AT&T expanded FirstNet to further boost its network capacity and give first responders always-on priority and preemption capabilities across all of its LTE spectrum bands, as well as Band 14: the block of spectrum public safety spent years fighting for. In an emergency, Band 14 can be cleared and locked just for FirstNet subscribers. That means, in addition to being able to talk with each other no matter which department or jurisdiction they’re based, first responder communications on FirstNet are always shielded from commercial network congestion and won’t get bogged down by spikes in wireless traffic during large events and emergencies.
“FirstNet helps save lives,” said Parkinson, who now serves as the FirstNet Authority’s CEO. “I don’t know of a more important reason to have an asset like FirstNet out there for public safety to use and for the public to benefit from.”
Dowd, who has since retired from the NYPD, added that while events like 9/11 made the need for FirstNet crystal clear, first responders feel its impact every day.
“And whether it’s in New York City or in a rural county in Iowa,” he said, “it makes a difference.”
LONDON, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Prolonged blackouts in Louisiana following Hurricane Ida are a reminder the power grid needs to become more resilient as well as reliable if even more services such as electric vehicles are going to depend on it in future.
The electricity system is already directly responsible for providing a wide range of energy services in homes, offices and factories, including space heating, air-conditioning, cooking, refrigeration and power.
The grid is also at the heart of a collection of other critical systems, including oil and gas supply, water and sewerage, transport, communications, public safety and healthcare, which cannot function properly without it…
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
