- Tech Lessons from the Seattle Snowstorm

Seattle EOC Activated

The Seattle area and I just went through a four day snow/ice storm event.  The City of Seattle’s emergency operations center (EOC) was activated and coordinated the City government’s response.  That response received high marks from the public and media for a variety of reasons (see Seattle Times editorial here), including the leadership of Mayor Michael McGinn.

I was able to personally observe that response and lead the technology support of it.   Information technology materially contributed to the improved response, nevertheless I see a number of further potential enhancements using technology .  And that’s the purpose of this blog entry.

GIS GIS GIS (Maps)

Every city, county and state is all about geography and maps.  Maps are the way we deploy resources (think “snowplows”).  Maps are the way we understand what’s happening in our jurisdiction.  Everyone who has lived and traveled inside a city can look on a map and instantly visualize locations – what the “West Seattle bridge” or any other street, infrastructure or geographical feature (think “hill”) looks like.

SDOT Snowplow Map

For this storm, we have some great mapping tools in place, especially a map which showed which streets had been recently plowed and de-iced.   This map used GPS technology attached to the snowplow trucks.  That same map had links to over 162 real-time traffic cameras so people could see the street conditions and traffic.  (Other cities, like Chicago, have similar maps.)

Electrical System Outage Map

Another useful map is the electrical utility’s system status map, which shows the exact locations of electrical system outages, the number of outages, the number of customers affected and the estimated restoration times.  This is really useful if you are a customer who is affected – at least you know we’ve received your problem and a crew will be on the way.

What could we do better?  We could put GPS on every City government vehicle and with every City crew and display all that information on a map.   That way we’d immediately know the location of all our resources.  If there was a significant problem – let’s say a downed tree blocking a road or trapping people – we could immediately dispatch the closest resources.  In that case we’d typically dispatch a transportation department tree-clearing crew.  But that crew might have to travel across the City when a parks department crew with the proper equipment might be a block away. 

This same sort of map could show a variety of other information – the location of police and fire units, which streets are closed due to steep hills and ice, where flooding is occurring, blocked storm drains, as well as water system and electrical outages.   This “common operating picture”, across departments, would be enormously useful – as just one example, the fire department needs water to fight fires, and it needs good routes to get its apparatus to the fire and perhaps it would need a snowplow to clear a street as well.

Obviously we wouldn’t want to show all of this information to the public – criminals would have a field day if they knew the location of police units!  But a filtered view certainly could be presented to show the City government in action.

Perceptions and Citizen Contact

A lot of media descended on Seattle this week.  Partly that was due to the uniqueness of the storm – it doesn’t snow much in this City.  And perhaps it was a slow news week in the world.  A lot of news crews filmed inside the EOC.  The Mayor and other key department spokespeople were readily available with information.  This is quite important – the television, radio and print/blog media are really important in advising the public on actions they should take (“public transit to commute today, don’t drive”) and actions they should avoid (“don’t use a charcoal grill to cook when you are without power”).  Our joint information center (JIC) was a great success.  

Mayor McGinn’s family even contributed to this – his 11 year old son filmed him in a public service announcement about how to clear a storm drain of snow and ice which is now posted on the Seattle Channel.  

What could we do better?   We need better video conferencing technology, so the Mayor and senior leaders can be reached quickly by news media without sending a crew to the EOC.  This video conferencing would also be quite useful in coordinating action plans between departments with leaders in different locations.   In a larger, regional, disaster, such capability would allow the governor, mayors and county executives to rapidly and easily talk to each other to coordinate their work.  It is much easier for anyone to communicate if they can see the visual cues of others on the call.  

Also, Seattle, like many cities, is a place of many languages and nationalities.   We need to have translators available to get communications out in the languages our residents speak.  This might include a volunteer-staffed translation team but at least could include recording and rapidly distributing written, video and audio/radio public service announcements in multiple languages.

Commuting; Telecommuting

In these emergencies, many people elect to use public transit – buses and trains for commuting.  (I actually took my “boat” – the water taxi - to work twice this week.)  Yet snowstorms are also the times when buses jackknife or get stuck in snowdrifts and going up hills.  

In this emergency, the coordination between the transit agency (“Metro”) and the City was quite improved, because we had people – liaisons – from each agency embedded with the other.   This allowed snowplows to help keep bus routes clear and help clear streets near trapped buses.  

And, with recent technology advances and sorta-broadband networks, many workers can now telecommute.  Seattle had few outages of Internet service this week, although in suburban areas trees and snow brought down not just power lines, but telephone and cable lines as well causing more widespread Internet issues.

What could we do better?  The easiest and most useful advance, I think, would be GPS on every bus and train and water taxi boat.   That, combined with real-time mapping, would allow people to see the location of their rides right on their smartphones.  If we deployed it right, such technology might also show how full the bus is and the locations of stuck buses.  This sort of technology would be useful every day for public transit users – but is especially important during snow emergencies.

Another huge necessity – which I’ve advocated often and loudly – is very high speed fiber broadband networks.   With fiber broadband – and Gigabit (a billion bits per second), two way, telecommuting and tele-education becomes really possible.  Kids could continue their school day with video classes even when schools are closed, you could visit your doctor, and of course citizens would have access to all that emergency information and maps described above, real time and two-way.  I could go on and on about this – and I have – read it here. 

Crowdsourcing and Two-Way Communications, Cell Phones

This area is the most ripe for improved technology to “weather the storm”. 

In any emergency – even a minor disaster like a major fire or a pile-up collision – just obtaining and distributing information early and often will have a significant result in managing the problem.   On-duty at any time, the City of Seattle may have 200 firefighters, 350 police officers and several hundred to several thousand other employees.   Yet we also have 600,000 people in the City, each one of which is a possible source  of information.   How could we get many of them, for example, to tell us the snow and ice conditions in their neighborhoods?   Or perhaps to tell us of problems such as clogged storm drains or stuck vehicles?  The Seattle Times actually did this a bit, crowdsourcing snow depths from Facebook. 

How can we “crowd source” such information?   I’m not exactly sure.  Perhaps we could use Facebook apps or Twitter (although not a lot of people use Twitter).  Two-way text messages are possible.   Any one of these solutions would present a whole mass of data which needs to be processed, tagged for reliability, and then presented as useful analytics.    Eventually, of course, there will be whole armies of remote sensors (“the Internet of things”) to collect and report the information.   Perhaps everyone’s cell phone might eventually be a data collector (yes, yes, I’m well aware of privacy concerns).

In the meantime, we should have some way citizens can sign up for alerts about weather or other problems.   Many such systems exist, such as the GovDelivery-powered one used by King County Transportation.   I’m not aware of such a system being used two-way, to crowd-source information from citizens.   There are also plenty of community-notification or “Reverse 911” systems on the market.  The Federal government is developing CMAS, which would automatically alert every cell phone / mobile device in a certain geographical area about an impending problem or disaster. 

Furthermore, during this Seattle snowstorm, many City of Seattle employees – including police and fire chiefs and department heads, used text messages on commercial cellular networks to communicate with their staff and field units.   This continues a tradition of use of text messaging during emergency operations which first came to prominence during Hurricane Katrina.

All of these solutions depend, of course, on reliable cellular networks.  We know during disasters commercial cellular networks can easily be overloaded (example:  2011 Hurricane Irene), calls dropped and cell sites can drop out of service as power outages occur and backup batteries at the sites run out of juice.   Yet, for people without power or land-line Internet, a smartphone with internet is a potential lifesaver and at least a link to the outside world.  I’d like a way to easily collect this information – privately – from the carriers so emergency managers would know the geographies where mobile networks are impacted. 

This leads me, of course, to my final point – that we need a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network.  Such a network would be built using spectrum the Congress and the FCC have set aside for this purpose.  It would only be used by public safety, although – as our Seattle snowstorm underscored, “public safety” must be used broadly to include utilities, transportation and public works – even building departments.  And it would be high speed and resilient, with 4G wireless technology and backup generators, hardened cell sites. 

These are a few of my thoughts on better management, through technology, of future snowstorms and other disasters, large and small, both daily and once-in-a-lifetime ones.   What have I missed?

- S.911: Profiles in Courage

Vice President Joe Biden leading the charge

It is fascinating how words and phrases take on difference nuances of meaning depending upon their context. I guess that’s why it is so hard for computers (IBM’s Watson notwithstanding) to understand and properly interpret human speech or, in many cases, writing. Take “911″. In most contexts and for most people, that would be the police/fire emergency number . The number you’d call to get help with a heart attack or a burglary-in-progress or a lost child.

But 9/11 refers to that infamous day when terrorist Osama bin Laden’s gang of terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City.

Now, today, 911 has a new meaning. S.911 is the United States Senate bill sponsored by Senators Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, which allocates additional spectrum and $11.75 billion in funding to build a nationwide interoperable public safety wireless broadband network.

That bill passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee on a vote of 21 to 4 on June 8th.

On June 16th, Vice President Joe Biden and public safety officials from cities and states across the country celebrated this huge step forward on a long road toward building that network. Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and many others called upon the full Senate and House to pass the bill, so the President could sign it this year.

You don’t usually think of Senators as “courageous”, but we have twenty-one really courageous Senators on that Commerce Committee (and a courageous former senator in Vice President Biden).

They faced (and continue to face) a wide variety of pressures:

• The continuing pain of the Federal budget deficit, which threatens to suck away the almost $12 billion allocated in this bill for public safety.
• The pressure from some wireless telecommunications companies, who would rather see that spectrum given to them to build more consumer networks;
• The Federal debt ceiling – which needs to be raised for the economic health of the nation – but many in Congress are holding that rise hostage to force budget cuts;
• A lack of trust by some in the ability of state and local governments, who some believe cannot be trusted to continue to build out the network. This is ironic, because when anyone telephones 911, it is local police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians who respond.  Furthermore, eight local governments are already building these networks under waivers from the FCC;
• A need by electric and water utilities, transportation agencies, and other critical infrastructure providers for spectrum to build their own interoperable networks so they can respond to hurricanes, tornadoes, windstorms and earthquakes too – luckily, if S.911 passes Congress, it would modify Federal law and allow these utilities to share the public safety network and spectrum;
• Oh, did I mention the Federal budget deficit as an as an excuse to NOT giving cops and firefighters and local governments the network they need to keep us all safe?

These are all poor reasons used to justify voting “no” on S.911. Reasons to justify inaction. Reasons to put the safety of 300 million Americans aside.

The campaign to pass S.911 – to fund and build this vital network – is significantly helped by the leadership of President Obama  and Vice-President Biden, who allocated the money in their 2012 budget. The Vice-President is especially active leading the charge to build this nationwide public safety wireless broadband network.  The Administration just issued a report describing the urgent need.

Yes, there is a lot of courage on that Senate Commerce Committee, and hopefully the courage is infectious and spreads to at least the 51 Senators and 217 members of the House needed to pass the legislation.

Because 9/11 is looming again.

9/11/11.

The 10th Anniversary of the terrorism at New York City’s World Trade Center. Where hundreds of firefighters and police officers lost their lives because their radio communications networks didn’t get them the order to evacuate the buildings which were about to collapse.

Will the rest of Congress have the courage to act?

- PITS Computing

Non-Computing Fads

There are fads and trends in information technology, just like in the world of clothing or hairstyles. One of the latest fads is pie-in-the-sky computing (PITS), otherwise as “cloud computing” or software-as-a-service – SAAS (pronounced as in “sassy”).

But I’ll call it pie-in-the-sky (PITS) computing, just to be different and even a bit contrary.

PITS computing is only the latest in a long line of sea-changes in IT. Electronic data processing (EDP – now there’s an old term) was the very first of these trends, appearing on the scene in the 1950s and 1960s. EDP was a world of punch cards and paper tape. EDP was the era of “glass house” data centers and a computer “priesthood”. Computers were far too expensive and esoteric for normal human beings to comprehend or touch. So there was a “priesthood” of specially anointed and trained computer specialists whose job was the programming, care and feeding of the electronic monsters.

But the development of computing technology continued relentlessly. Along came mainframe computing (green-screen). personal computing, local-area-network computing, client-server computing and Internet or web computing.

Each one of these phases was driven by some significant technological advance. The development of microchips and the Intel 8088 processor, for example, drove the personal computing trend. (Thank you Intel and IBM!) The development of Ethernet standards drove networking which allowed individual computers to talk to each other.

And then computing, of course, became part of the mainstream culture. Any human being in a developed country knows “windows” doesn’t refer to that wonderful device for seeing through walls, the “glass window”, but rather the portal into the world of computers, an operating system developed and marketed by Microsoft. And almost no one thinks of the “web” as a home for spiders or the “net” as a tool for catching fish or butterflies.

In this context, PITS is the latest fad in computing and technology. PITS is driven by the appearance of more-or-less ubiquitous and reliable high speed networking. Networks today, thanks to fiber optic cable, the router/switch revolution (thank you Cisco) and advances in wireless (wi-fi and 3G telecomm networks), are virtually everywhere. Or at least everywhere where human beings live and companies and governments do significant business.

And these networks are reliable. The wired networks almost never go down, although the signal can get weak or strange with wireless. In my house for example, our Wi-Fi network connected to a wired DSL Internet connection has 105 megabits per second of throughput. Yet my commercial telecomm provided cell phone only works at a certain specific spot in the kitchen in front of the microwave!

Most enterprises now operate with giant central servers which store data and applications. At the City of Seattle, for example, we have computer aided dispatch systems which reside on central servers at a “highly secret” police department location. The police data resides there, but cops on the street can access criminal records and license plate information which reside not only in Seattle but also on the other side of the nation or even on another continent.

Our water utility manages pumps and valves and dams and reservoirs across the entire county and up into the Cascade mountains. City Light, our electrical utility, manages an electrical grid which spans the entire state of Washington.

We all routinely use the web to find information and read the news. But we also increasingly use it to store spreadsheets or photos or documents on our own websites or using servers such as Google apps. Microsoft is embracing the trend, with its Office 2010 now available “for free” in a PITS cloud.

So if Microsoft Office can be in a “cloud” somewhere on the Internet, why can’t our payroll system or e-mail system or financial management system be halfway across the State in a data center in Grant County, Washington (next to giant hydroelectric dams to supply the power) or even halfway across the United States, well outside the Seattle earthquake disaster zone?

Of course the applications and data can be almost anywhere. In the past, I’ve been skeptical of PITS / cloud computing because I didn’t trust the networks to stay up in a disaster, and I was concerned about the security of information stored in a non-descript data center in a distant location outside my personal control.

But with today’s reliable networks, the network is not the issue. And major companies like Microsoft or Amazon or Google handle the management and security better than most governments or small businesses. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the World Trade Center disaster, the data could actually reside in multiple different locations around the nation, increasing our ability to withstand a disaster like that 8.0 magnitude earthquake.

It will be a while before we in government embrace PITS, because the loss of control is a big cultural change for governments and many large companies to swallow. Just like people were concerned when their data moved off their desktop computers to a server, and servers moved out of the closet on the same floor to a centralized computer center in the government complex, so it will take us some time to embrace having those computers in an unnamed nondescript but super-secure location, possibly right next to the bunker where Vice-President Dick Cheney hung out after September 11th.

But embrace it we will.

- A Peek at the National Broadband Plan

Broadband Wireless

On January 26th Admiral Jamie Barnett of the FCC spoke about the National Broadband Plan, which is now due out on March 17^th (and I understand New York City, Boston and other cities with large Irish-American populations plan to have parades in honor of the plan that day, too!)

As a CTO, I’m so immersed in technology that I’m not sure “broadband” means anything to the average American (if an “average” American exists).   Certainly most Americans are now at least aware of the Internet and use technology in their lives, even if that tech is nothing more than a cell phone or ATM.   But all you have to do is watch the security lines at any airport and see all the laptops and luggables and cell phones and DVD players and other associated smart lumps of plastic dumped on the scanner lines to know that tech is ubiquitous in most people’s lives.

A significant fraction of people know about broadband and what it means.   In Seattle, some 84% of homes have an Internet connection, 75% have something faster than dial-up and 88% have a computer at home.  Of course Seattle’s got a reputation as a city of high tech folks (an image Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and I work hard to polish).   But even nationwide 79% of homes have an Internet connection and 63% are faster than dial-up.  The source for these stats is here.  

These are numbers are hard to fathom when one considers the web didn’t exist 20 years ago,  and most people probably thought “Internet” had something to do with basketball, volleyball, tennis or another “net-centric” sport.

Admiral Barnett heads the Homeland Security and Public Safety Bureau at the FCC.   He’s charged with making wireless spectrum available to government in general and specifically to the law enforcement, firefighting and emergency medical agencies who keep the public safe.   He spoke at the Winter Summit of Association of Public Safety Communications Officials on January 26th, and gave us a glimpse of what the National Broadband Plan will contain. 

Admiral Barnett’s remarks centered on wireless spectrum for use by first responders.  About 10 Megahertz is available nationwide for public safety, but the license for that is held by a  single nationwide organization.     Yet most police, fire and emergency medical agencies are operated by cities and counties.    Given this paradoxical situation, 17 states and cities have requested waivers from the FCC to use that spectrum in their local areas to immediately create networks for their use.  

And why is the spectrum required?   These new wireless networks hold promise that cops in police vehicles can see videos of crimes in progress as they race to crime scenes, or rapidly access building plans, images and video.  Have a peek at a  report prepared by PTI and APCO here for more uses.  

According to Admiral Barnett, those waivers may be granted later this year so we can get started building the network.  The FCC is very interested in public-private partnerships to build the networks because many jurisdictions don’t have funds to construct such networks for themselves.  Luckily, commercial cell phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T, and companies like Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent have signed on in support of this plan, and are developing new networks including  LTE (long term evolution) for not only their own networks but also for public safety use.   This means public safety agencies could use a network built and funded by taxpayers (more resilient, better priority, less costly) for most of their work, but could roam only the commercial carriers’ networks when necessary.   This is in stark contrast to today’s networks, where police/fire radios are incompatible with the cell phone networks.  The best of both worlds!

It looks like the FCC will encourage these partnerships in its plan. 

The FCC also knows that funding will be required to construct these networks.   Admiral Barnett understands funding is required not just to build the networks, but to operate them.  Besides public-private partnerships, the FCC is floating the idea of an Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC) to pushing forward on a national public safety wireless network.  We’ll hear more about this on February 10^th.

Finally, Barnett said  “next generation 911” will also be recognized in the national broadband plan.   Right now, the only way to get information to a 911 center is to … well … telephone 911!    But many citizens’ cell phones have the capability to do text messages, take photos and video.   Yet 911 centers have little or no capability to accept such media, which can be critical to rapidly apprehending perpetrators and rendering aid to victims.   We higher-speed land line fiber optic networking between 911 centers and other public safety and government facilities too, and I hope that will be in the Plan.

Twenty years ago, very few people knew of the Internet or Web.   Now it is an indispensible part of most people’s lives and a vital component of our HomeCity security and public safety.  But we need more network SPEED, both wired and wireless.  The National Broadband Plan could be, with a bit of vision by the FCC, a roadmap to the future of the nation.

- UASI, Bureaucracy and Terror

Homeland InSecurity

This week I was, in turn, amused, maddened and fasincated by disaster. I had the opportunity to do both leadership and followership as officials from the “Seattle Urban Area” considered projects to submit for grant funding from the fedgov Department of Homeland Insecurity.

This whole process is a look into the little-known culture of “homeland insecurity” which has blossomed over the last 7 years.

Let me say, right at the beginning, that September 11th, 2001, was a horrific event and a real wake-up call for the United States. We’ve been taught the same lesson we learned on December 7th, 1941 – two huge oceans do not make for a nation secure from the enemies of our way of life. My somewhat humorous tone in this blog is not meant to make light of the serious threats we face.

But what is our major response? Pretty typically, we create a giant bureaucracy, slosh a lot of political rhetoric and some money around, and get prepared to fight … the last war.

The major bureaucracy is, of course, the Department of Homeland Security, or Insecurity, as I’ve named it, because it heads an industry and set of programs based upon the fear and feelings of insecurity of the American People. DHS is really a myriad of individual bureaucracies and programs, sometimes working at cross-purposes and often duplicating effort.

But I stray from the subject – the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), usually pronounced You-Ah-Zee. In 2009 about $1.8 billion will be granted to urban areas through a series of programs as shown here. The UASI grants are made to “urban areas”, a carefully defined (by the fedgov) set of metropolitan areas which share vulnerabilities and threats. The “Seattle Urban Area” is the City of Seattle, its surrounding King County, and the counties to the north and south. The Seattle urban area is eligible for $11 million, more or less, of that $1.8 billion pie.

Now $11 million may sound like a lot of money, and it is. But think about the Seattle Urban Area – a population of 3 million people, two major ports (Seattle and Tacoma) into which ships with nuclear bombs or bioterrorism agents or chemical weapons could sail, three major military bases (Naval Station Everett, McChord Air Force Base, Fort Lewis), and vulnerability to a potential magnitude 8.0 earthquake. We probably have 12,000 cops and firefighters (Seattle alone has 2,200), each of which needs radios and hazmat gear and training. All of a sudden, $11 million doesn’t sound like a lot, and it isn’t.

Its also a little amazing that places like Vermont and Wyoming – not exactly your typical terrorist or disaster targets – get $6 million each. But that’s the reality of politics in our 2009 world with two senators from every state and a lot of dollars to be allocated.

Each year, a group of officials from the emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public health and technology disciplines – the officials responsible to prepare the region for disasters and terrorist events – get together to consider projects for UASI funding. We did that this week in the Seattle Urban Area. We have a strategy to guide us but it is still a give-and-take to determine which projects are most importnat to the region.

I lead the subgroup of technical and operational staff responsible to consider and prioritize interoperable communications projects. These are the networks and systems which allow first, second and third responders to communicate with each other and with their dispatch centers to prepare for and respond to disasters large and small. They include handheld and vehicle-mounted radios, computer and telephone systems, and fiber optic networks.

Small disasters are the ones which occur every day – such as when I fell off my bicycle, shattered my arm and called 911 for help. The large ones are the fires, landslides, earthquakes, and (God forbid) terrorist events which may afflict our region.

Finding projects which prepare us for those disasters and which fit into $11 million is daunting. In the past we’ve procured fireboats and helicopters and personal protective equipment. We’ve found money for training our responders, buying radios and for public outreach and disaster preparedness campaigns. It is hard work to winnow 100 proposed projects and $40 million in needs down to a dozen or so projects with $11 million or so, but we mostly did it this week. In future blog entries I’ll talk about some of those projects – the ones I can reveal without making us more vulnerable to terrorists (and that is most of them).

In the meantime, I’m just proud of the emergency managers, fire and police officials, and technical staff I was able to spend time with this week, prioritizing projects to keep the Seattle urban area safe.

And I’m tired!

- City Averts Power Outage

Seattle City Data Center under Full Power

Seattle’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was activated yesterday, Friday, August 15th, for a downtown Seattle power emergency – several banks of transformers failed at City Light’s Union Street substation, one of two substations serving the downtown core.  City Light (Seattle’s municipal electric utility – a department of City Government) shut down power to some portions of the waterfront, and asked downtown buildings to significantly reduce their electrical use in order to avoid a complete failure of the downtown grid.  All this on one of the hottest days of the year (95 degrees) for Seattle.

There was no exensive power failure, so the headline “City Light Avoids 90 Degree Outage” in the Seattle PI was buried in the local section, and the problem was just a footnote in the Seattle Times.

How do City government information technology workers respond to emergencies like this?   We’ve had lots of practice – WTO riots, Nisqually earthquake, electrical vault fires, windstorms, actual cyberattacks - and we intentionally conduct emergency operations drills both as a Department of Information Technology (DoIT) and as part of City-wide or region-wide drills such as Soundshake.  

Yesterday we went through our well-drilled disaster response:   directors and managers alerted all employees.    On our own – even before the EOC was activated – we sent desktop and server technical staff plus telephone, data communication and radio system technicians to the EOC to prepare it for activation.   The EOC was activated using a DoIT-maintained “community notification” or telephone call-out system to all critical City government executives.   When the EOC was activated, we sent an executive there to support the City’s leadership in making crucial decisions about the event.  (See also my previous blog entry about the City’s new EOC facility.)

Because this was a power emergency – and because our data centers are a major consumer of downtown power – we activated a long-standing protocol to reduce power consumption.   All servers and equipment in the data center are color coded based on their importance to government operations.   We shut those systems down in an orderly fashion as rapidly as possible.   We also have uninterruptible power supplies and a one-megawatt backup generator for the main data center, plus many other backup generators for critical technology services throughout the City of Seattle.

Yesterday was a hot day in Seattle.  It didn’t get hotter, thanks to well-practiced disaster drills and pre-planning!

- Dedication to a Safer Seattle

City of Seattle's new Fire and Emergency Ops Centers

Original Post:  17 May 2008
I was privileged today to participate in the dedication of the City of Seattle’s new Fire Alarm Center, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and Fire Station #10.   The City is committed to building or remodeling all its fire stations, funded by a levy passed by Seattle voters in 2003 (more information here).  
This building – and the people who work in it – are dedicated to managing and mitigating disasters.   These disasters could be personal ones – a heart attack (Seattle’s long been known as the “best place to have a heart attack“!?) or an injury from a car accident or a house fire, as all calls to 911 in Seattle for medical emergencies and fires will be accepted and dispatched here.  Or the disaster couple be a regional one such as an earthquake or a terrorist event or a trip by the Seattle Mariners to the World Series.  Well, that wouldn’t be a disaster, exactly, but because of the security needs, we’d activate the EOC.
I’m especially proud of this facility, as over 120 employees of the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) and IT employees from the Fire and Police Departments worked to put $7 million in communications and technology into the building.   This includes, for example, connections at Fire Dispatch consoles and every EOC table to the King County public safety trunked radio network.  There’s also a state-of-the-art 96 way video switch for accepting input from traffic cameras, commercial television (CNN, Seattle broadcast stations), and video conferencing, and routing it to HDTV screens on the walls and at the desktops throughout the facility.   There is fiber and phones and links to 911 and homeland-security-military-grade secure communications.   All installed by this set of City employees in a remarkably short time – essentially over six months once the building was ready.  Helping to fulfill the Mayor’s pledge to make Seattle the City best prepared for a disaster, including the small, personal, ones.