Posted On Thursday, June 30, 2011
Success stories in emergency management are always welcome, particularly given the widespread tendency of the news media to concentrate primarily on the headline aspects of major disasters. But in UK there have been a number of good news stories in which emergency services - fire, police and ambulance - have demonstrated how the application of new communications solutions, training and new methods of working have delivered significant benefits.
One such project is the HART programme, the national initiative supported by a technology partnership with Excelerate Technology that is helping to deliver a hugely improved Ambulance Service capability for responding to a wide range of major disasters and emergencies. The programme has been so successful that it is now being looked at as a model for other ambulance services (and other emergency services) around the world.
It is widely accepted that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and 7/7 ‘changed everything’ for all emergency services around the world. New operating procedures, new equipment, new technologies and more genuinely multi-agency approaches needed to be adopted to deal with new and potentially more lethal threats, including attacks involving Chemical Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) agents.
The UK Ambulance Service’s response to this major public safety challenge has been highly innovative and world leading. The HART (Hazardous Area Response Teams) project, a collaboration between the Department of Health and the Ambulance Service, has pioneered a whole new expanded role for ambulance service personnel, training and equipping them for working within the ‘hot zone’ of major incidents. Now, following its demonstrable success, this ground-breaking project is generating interest from ambulance services (and other emergency services) around the world, who are keen to learn how it was done - challenges, solutions, lessons learned - without having to reinvent the wheel in their own territories.
Equipping the Ambulance Service to work in more challenging environments has produced benefits beyond the ability to respond just to terrorist attacks, however. Urban Search and Rescue is another field in which the HART approach to incident response has been delivering major benefits. In addition, HART teams are being used increasingly to assist in a wide variety of day-to-day emergencies, many of them multi-agency. These have included firearms incidents (the Raoul Moat shootings, for example), chemical incidents and wildfires (in the Royal Berkshire FRS region in early summer 2011), thereby delivering even greater value for money from the project’s investment.
Underpinning the whole HART programme has been the desire to adopt the most advanced and resilient command and communications technologies for supporting improved incident ground communications, better command decision making and enhanced public and emergency worker safety. As judicial enquiries into recent major emergencies such as 7/7 have revealed, emergency services have been very prone to suffering from critical communications failures during such crises, and this has affected the effectiveness of response and endangered lives. Emergency services need more resilient communications to ensure multiple command options, to provide protection against single points of failure and to avoid complete reliance on any public network. Never again will it be acceptable for any emergency service to permit such foreseeable and preventable resilience problems to occur, given the proven and successful new technologies which now exist for providing robust, resilient emergency communications.
HART and Excelerate have addressed these safety critical issues, developing and integrating solutions to prevent such problems from ever happening again. Every Forward Command Vehicle within the HART fleet (based in the various regions throughout the UK) features some of the world’s most advanced communications technologies (satellite broadband, wireless video, interoperable communications, independent GSM networks and advanced command and control systems).
Satellite broadband gives users robust, high bandwidth access to the internet for the two-way transfer of large amounts of voice, video and other data; COFDM (a standard for wireless transmission of video imagery that has been well established in sports broadcasting for some time) supports fixed and mobile wireless video around incident grounds, and independent GSM networks provide resilience and backup if public systems are compromised under the pressure of major public safety events. Where required, technology has been specifically developed and integrated for operational requirements, such as the interoperable ECMS (Excelerate Communications Management Suite) connecting different types of communications devices seamlessly, and simple yet effective communications and monitoring of on-board systems.
Satellite broadband is one of the key technologies at the heart of this new approach for improving single and multi-agency emergency management. It is the only effective type of solution available for delivering enough guaranteed bandwidth anywhere to run an increasing number of voice, data and video applications. With competitively priced packages negotiated by Excelerate, costs are also substantially lower than expected and beat commercial 3G on both cost and reliability grounds.
Making these powerful technologies mobile, and then integrating them into user-friendly mobile command vehicles, has been the result of a huge amount of thought, planning, testing and technological development. While it was always intended that the new Forward Command Vehicles would take advantage of the latest developments in mobile satellite broadband and wireless technologies, making such technologies work together in a way that is suitable for non-specialist operators in relatively compact vehicles presented major design and integration challenges.
The company selected to become the technology partner in this high tech project was Excelerate Technology Ltd, a pioneer in the field of satellite and wireless communications in the UK and a company which has now become the UK market leader and an active supplier worldwide. Once a prototype vehicle had been developed it was exhaustively tested and improved by Excelerate over an 18-month period. This culminated in a final agreed version of the layout and solutions to be used which would provide a national Forward Command Vehicle specification and framework agreement for the entire fleet. Senior HART project managers worked in a close collaborative partnership with the Excelerate Technology team. Getting it right was critical as the national fleet was to be of a substantial size - a total of 18 HART Forward Command Vehicles in England (of which 15 sets of vehicles have been built so far, with a further 3 being built this year) and one in Wales. In defining their own requirements for command vehicles, the Scottish Ambulance Service worked in close collaboration with their colleagues south of the border, to ensure common platform specifications and full interoperability.
Driving the acquisition of all this new technology have been command objectives such as the clearly identified need for emergency service personnel to receive maximum command and communications support for doing their life saving work efficiently, for personnel to be deployed using safe systems of work, and for the establishment and sharing of a Common Operational Picture across a joined-up, digital incident ground, for both single and multi-agency incidents.
The Ambulance Service in Scotland is also an enthusiastic user of mobile satellite broadband and wireless solutions, with their vehicles also being supplied by Excelerate. Its SORT (Special Operations Response) Teams use Forward Command Vehicles featuring integrated communications, data, voice and video technologies, providing command teams with the optimum combination of rapidly deployable communications, data access and live video infrastructure where none previously exists (or if existing infrastructure has been compromised and requires additional resilience). Internal vehicle layout and positioning of screens, communications systems and computers were all trialled to achieve the best possible use of space for command vehicle crews and commanders working under high pressure.
RapidNet Private GSM is also available for maintaining communications with field-based personnel when service from the main network providers is unavailable. The solution provides full, stand-alone backup GSM telecoms capacity, thereby eliminating the risk of a repetition of the communications problems experienced following the 7/7 bombings in London, when networks overloaded by public usage collapsed.
Private GSM enables secure and private access away from normal terrestrial networks, eliminating problems caused by congestion, security breaches and unavailability. For added resilience the units also have 3G Failover, to cover any eventuality should any of the systems fail.
When HART (or SORT) vehicles are positioned together they can create a wireless MESH network for enhanced communications, which can then be extended using Excelerate's wireless nodes, giving field personnel the ability to operate using ruggedised laptops and other wireless devices within a secure area.
COFDM body-worn cameras can also be deployed by HART and SORT personnel, allowing real time, on-the-spot video streams of an incident (even within building collapses and tunnel and underground incidents) to be viewed by commanders in the Forward Command Vehicle and on hand-held devices, as well as being streamed back to the control room via satellite broadband.
‘The IT on them is phenomenal,’ says Brian Hunter, of the Scottish Ambulance Service. ‘For instance, I was at a chemical incident a few months ago and we were looking to see where the plume was going to blow. The weather forecast people were saying it was going this way, but because of the little weather station in the vehicle we could see what the wind was actually doing on the site. We put the big camera up and we could see the leak.”
‘All the other emergency services that have seen these vehicles have been very envious of what they can do. We used one at the Pope’s visit last year, in conjunction with the police and the fire services. We set it up in the park and the police used it to monitor the crowds. Although it is an Ambulance Service vehicle, it’s actually a multi-partner, multi-agency vehicle as far as we are concerned.’
David Savage, founder and CEO of Excelerate Technology, said: ‘The Scottish SORT and English HART vehicles were spawned on the back of our experience and partnerships with early adopter customers such as Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, Royal Berkshire Ambulance Service (now South Central Ambulance Service), Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service and Thames Valley Police. They represent the current pinnacle of what can be achieved with the right degree of time, imagination and budget. They were developed to address all the pitfalls of working in situations, wherever they may be, when reliance on any one single or public infrastructure represents a significant risk, as highlighted at major events such as New York's 9/11 and London's 7/7 terrorist incidents.
‘What is also driving Excelerate is the understanding that personnel operating our technology are paramedics, fire officers and police officers, not specialist IT personnel. Using SORT and HART as the benchmark of sophistication (but avoiding unnecessary complexity), we set about developing different ways of helping operational personnel understand exactly what technology was at their disposal - how to operate it in the easiest way possible, how to understand when and how it was working, or not, and then, if there was a problem, how to support them with minimum human intervention or expertise at their end.
‘At the same time, it was essential that we took measures to minimise downtime and free up operators to do the things they were really at the incident to do.
The proven success of the Excelerate’s unique combination of communications solutions (including the remarkable Sherpa climbing camera), along with technical and training support, is generating growing interest worldwide. Emergency services are under huge pressure to cut manpower and other costs. But they are also under pressure to ensure that they can still respond effectively on a multi-agency basis to a wide range of emergencies and civil resilience incidents. This remains a high priority with the public, politicians and the media. The HART and SORT approach delivers on all these objectives, and it is hardly surprising therefore that it is generating such intense interest around the world.
Back To News