by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 31, 2018 | Comm Center News
A widespread outage on CenturyLink’s cloud network that lasted almost two days and hampered emergency phone service in Washington and other states was caused by a faulty network management card, according to a customer notice.
SOURCE: GeekWire
DATE: December 29, 2018
Brian Krebs, a veteran security journalist, posted a copy of a notice sent to CenturyLink’s “core customers” to his Twitter feed Saturday that blamed a card at its data center in Colorado for “propagating invalid frame packets across devices,” causing a series of issues that forced the company to reboot much of its networking equipment. It took CenturyLink more than two days from when it first identified the issues to sound the all-clear on Saturday morning, a period during which 911 services in several states including Washington were down or spotty.
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 28, 2018 | Comm Center News
DATE: The first year of Minnesota’s statewide Text-to-911 system is showing that the service is saving lives and making it easier to contact first responders.
SOURCE: Redwood Falls Gazette
DATE: December 27, 2018
The department of public safety emergency communication networks division (DPS-ECN) reports that dispatchers received more than 4,500 texts since the program’s deployment in December 2017, an average of 375 texts per month.
Text-to-911 provides a direct lifeline for the 20 percent of Minnesotans who have some form of hearing loss. DPS-ECN has worked closely with the Minnesota Commission of Deaf, Deaf-blind and Hard of Hearing Minnesotans to educate the public about the service.
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 19, 2018 | Articles, Comm Center News
Margaret Mims
Fresno County Sheriff
“When I first heard about FirstNet, I thought, ‘here’s our opportunity to fix that problem.’” – Margaret Mims, Fresno County Sheriff
Fresno County has urban areas, a valley floor and high, rugged mountains. We have sworn personnel, a mounted posse, four-wheel drive, air squadron, mountaineer and canine volunteers.
We need to be able to communicate with them when they’re in remote locations. They need to be able to talk to each other. And we need to be able to communicate with other agencies involved. So, operability is critical when it comes to our search and rescue calls.
That’s been a common theme in my nearly four decades in law enforcement when it comes to the after-action reports of major incidents. Almost every time, communication among agencies has been an issue.
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by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 10, 2018 | Comm Center News
By Christopher Vondracek
When Tom Guthrie served as Vice President of Smart Public Safety Solutions with Motorola Solutions, he first became aware of a small innovator in advanced emergency technology.
“I was excited by what these guys were doing because it seemed like the technology was moving quickly in other sectors, but not yet in public safety.”
That company was RapidSOS. Now, in 2018, Guthrie has joined RapidSOS as VP of Public Safety Operations, and he’s happy to be with the company, who has now only continued to gain strength as a reliable partner for first responders around the country. The company provides rich supplemental emergency data through a secure platform, the NG911 Clearinghouse.Public safety agencies can access data at no cost through an integration with their existing software or a web-based tool called RapidLite.
“We already provide data to PSAPs covering 180 million people, and next year we’re aiming to cover close to the full population,” said Guthrie.
A common problem for many first responders is that in 2018,many 911 calls are still not able to be located. According to RapidSOS, the company’s system helps push rich data into the hands of 911 first responders to help make a caller’s location more attainable. It uses data from the location technology seen in most smartphones.
RapidSOS solves a problem unique to the emergency communications network: it can lag behind technology. While Uber and your local pizza delivery joint can pinpoint the location of a caller based on the phone,public safety answering points (PSAPs) still ask the carrier.
Guthrie, who works out of Colorado, employs an analogy for the west.
“Let’s say a family from Alexandria, Virginia flies out to Estes Park for vacation and gets into a troubling situation with an elk and wonders and needs to call 911 but wonders, ‘Where am I?’”
A dispatcher may not know how to pinpoint the individual.But RapidSOS—in milliseconds—takes the call, sends out a bid asking,essentially, “do you have any information about this caller?”, and quickly RapidSOS can provide to that dispatcher everything from location to the caller’s identification and even further discriminating information, such as whether that caller is in an Uber.
According to information from the Harvard Data Center,RapidSOS is estimated to cut 2 to 10 percent off mortality rates due to faster response times. Healthcare costs are also reduced by between 7 and 20 percent.
“The whole NG 911 (next generation) was defined in the age of telephony,” said Guthrie.“They haven’t yet looked at broadband data like we do.”
RapidSOS is still growing. Guthrie says they are “well capitalized” and “ready to go to the next step,” to include building out the operational scale and expanding, potentially someday, internationally. RapidSOS serves PSAP’s in 35 states. Overall, 2,000 PSAP’s receive data from RapidSOS.
One commitment for RapidSOS was to field a team competent in the public safety arena. “A big part of our team are former directors of PSAPs,” Guthrie said.“They all have operational personas. They know exactly how the public is in public safety.”
As more public safety agencies, especially police forces,
adopt the plan, they hope to increase information content and flow to officers.
“The golden piece is location,” said Guthrie.“What’s the path? If you’ve got someone on foot or in a car, there’s a lot of stuff about capabilities for health and situational information from connected car, smart home, and wearable devices. If I knew vital signs, this health information could go into the Clearinghouse.”
Information could include things like the name (“Tom”),
heartbeat data, and a history of heart conditions.
Finally, the piece of home security also blends in with normal day-to-day mobility.
“You’ve got your favorite device, you’ve flown to DC, and there’s an alert on your phone that something’s going on in Rapid City, South Dakota. If I call 911, it’ll know not to respond in DC but my location in Rapid City to respond to my house.”
Guthrie said RapidSOS has the potential to provide a variety of supplemental emergency data types, the goal not being to reinvent the PSAP wheel but, in Guthrie’s words,“plug into a system we already use.”
And a system he was an early supporter of that he’s now happy to join.
Christopher Vondracek is a freelance journalist living in Washington D.C., most recently with Courthouse News.
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 4, 2018 | Articles, Comm Center News
Download Original Paper
Abstract
Introduction: Identification of persons based on verbal descriptions is one of the key skills of police work. Gathering as much description information as possible immediately following the event—for example, at the point of emergency police dispatch—could substantially improve the accuracy of suspect descriptions, the ability to locate missing persons quickly, and other key outcomes of effective police work.
Objective: The primary objective of this study was to determine what amount and type of persons description information is collected by Emergency Police Dispatchers (EPDs), both overall and by Chief Complaint Protocol.
Methods: This is a retrospective, descriptive study of the Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS) data from five emergency communication centers in the United States of America, collected between September 2014 and May 2017.
Results: During the study period, a total of 117,160 (58.1%) calls had at least one item from the Description Essentials (DE) Tool: Person’s Description recorded. The Chief Complaint Protocols that had the highest frequency of person DE collected were Missing/Runaway/Found Person (99.0%), Suicidal Person/Attempted Suicide (97.1%), and Domestic Disturbance/
Violence (90.0%). The most commonly recorded person DE elements were the four required measures: gender, race, age, and clothing. Among non-required DE elements, the most common was name (38.7%), and the least common were demeanor and complexion (1.3% each). By far the most common type of person described was “suspect” (78.4% of cases).
Conclusions: Overall, trained and certified EPDs using the PPDS are effective at collecting information about persons and entering it correctly. Different types of events require somewhat different approaches to description gathering. EPDs appear to discriminate among these different event types while (mostly) making sure to collect required information. Additional
definitions, small changes to when and how the ProQA DE Tool appears, and possible removal of two seldom-used descriptors have been recommended based on these findings.
Topics:Description Essentials|Emergency Police Dispatch (EPD)|eyewitness|Person Descriptions|Police Priority Dispatch System (PPDS)|suspect/subject
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 4, 2018 | Articles, Comm Center News
Download Original Paper
Abstract
Introduction: The Emergency Medical Dispatcher’s (EMD’s) selection of the most appropriate Chief Complaint Protocol is one of the most important elements in emergency dispatching. Choosing the correct Chief Complaint ensures that the correct information is gathered, the correct instructions and help provided, and the right resources sent. The selection of the MPDS Sick Person Protocol is often one of the most difficult for EMDs.
Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to compare the EMD’s selection of the Sick Person Protocol with on-scene responders’ findings when patient contact is made. The secondary objective is to compare specific details gathered on the Sick Person Protocol with on-scene responders’ findings.
Methods: This is a retrospective study using data from a single, urban, highperformance emergency medical services (EMS) system in central Virginia, USA.
Results: Overall, 44,163 ProQA cases were collected for the study period, of which 6,732 (15.2%) were handled on the Sick Person Protocol. The strong majority (62.1%) of calls fell into the ALPHA Priority Level. For most of the cases, the Primary Impression type was “pain,” a “GI/GU” (gastrointestinal or genitourinary) problem, or “weakness.” However, three Key Question answers predicted another Primary Impression: “neuro,” or neurological complaint.
Conclusions: These findings indicate that the EMDs at this agency are appropriately selecting the Sick Person Protocol and that when used correctly (by an ACE-accredited agency), the Sick Person Protocol correctly triages the few higher-acuity conditions, such as altered level of consciousness, into higher Priority Levels.
Topics:EMD|ePCR|MPDS|ProQA|Protocol 26|sick person protocol
