Facility Design :
ESi offers a consulting service that assists customers in designing or modifying their EOC to better utilize new technology such as WebEOC™.

Emergency Services integrators (ESi) designs and integrates Emergency Operations Centers (EOC's) and Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP's or 9-1-1 Centers). 

Emergency Operations Center (EOC):
An EOC is often a multi-purpose facility. Properly designed and integrated an EOC usually makes a superb Emergency Management facility as well as a Classroom, Briefing Center, and Meeting area. With integrated centralized displays (usually projected) such a facility optimizes information management and presentation. Since most EOC's are rarely activated except for drills and exercises, daily utilization will offset the cost of these powerful presentation tools and enhance familiarity with their operation.

Total integration of all video, telecommunications, computing, visual displays, voice teleconferencing, and alarm systems onto computer platforms operating within a multiple screen, virtual desktop environment.

A state-of-the-art EOC may have computer generated displays projected on several contiguous large screens located along a wall. These projections can integrate status boards, maps, charts, briefing slides, CCTV, Video teleconferencing, TV (weather channel/CNN), live plume models, plans, procedures, checklists, etc. The room would be oriented to these displays with seating arrangements maximizing eye contact between decision-makers. The lighting type and levels would be appropriate for the facility. Floor, wall and ceiling acoustics would be in place. Door and window locations and types are carefully selected to control traffic patterns and insure optimum view-ability. Seating arrangements would reflect a thorough adjacency study to insure maximum efficiency. Noisy equipment such as printers, copiers, facsimile machines, pencil sharpeners would be strategically positioned. Phones would have lights rather than ringers, and headsets rather than handsets. Properly designed EOC's today are controlled environments with minimal noise and confusion resulting in a proper decision-making environment. Our team also evaluates basic construction, emergency power, lightning suppression, fire suppression, and filtration systems to insure redundancy and survivability.

ESi can evaluate your existing facility or a proposed project and provide a detailed report. Once completed this information will prepare your EOC for the implementation of an Emergency Information Management System such as WebEOC.

Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP or 9-1-1 Center):

A PSAP is a 7x24 operation that typically has two critical activities or areas we can refer to as the "dispatcher area" (where the Call Takers and/or Dispatchers are located) and the "equipment room" (where the critical systems are housed). The layout and design of both areas can be critical.

The design of the dispatcher area is critical because it must support high-density operations, long hours, and extreme wear. This is where the dispatchers, live, work, and eat, 24 hours each day. The selection of console furniture, seating, lighting, acoustics, flooring, and a myriad of details are essential to efficient operation.

The frame room or equipment room is also critical because proper design and installation within this area affects performance, reliability, and ease of access/use.

The PSAP serves as the focal point for high density communications utilizing phones, radios, speakers, position-to-position voice communications and occasional foot traffic from shift changes, visitors, etc. It is a critical asset to your community that is often designed by local contractors specializing in office space.

Properly designed PSAP's today are controlled environments with minimal noise and confusion resulting in an efficient environment. ESi can evaluate your existing facility or a proposed project and provide a report on our findings. Once completed this information will prepare your PSAP for new technology that will enhance the safety of your community.

A random example of facility systems to be evaluated are: traffic patterns, door locations, rear access requirements for console placement, raised computer flooring, acoustic wall paneling, demountable walls, HVAC including air flow and air quality, viewing windows, task lighting, room lighting, integrated headset systems to eliminate speakers, door handles instead of knobs, dutch doors to facilitate contact and contain foot traffic, ceiling shapes, wall and equipment colors, carpeting, ramps and railings, video system requirements, access and egress controls, seating, displays, console system designs, employee lockers, kitchen/break areas, premise communications, networking, primary electrical power, emergency power, UPS requirements, bonding and grounding, and much more.

See the Universal DispatcherTM ESi's (fully integrated) dispatcher console providing industry leading integration technology since 1996.

ESi Design Services - a background:

Emergency Operations Centers (EOC's) should be highly specialized facilities primarily designed to capture, distribute, and assess emergency information to facilitate rapid and accurate decision-making. Unfortunately most are designed by companies that specialize in office space, or by the resident staff as an extension of their prior experience. Most existing facility designs are obsolete today, representing at best mid-eighties technology. Modern telephony has changed the operation of Emergency Information Management Systems, and information drives the decision-making process.

The majority of Emergency Response Organizations (ERO) are made up of qualified managers, scientists, and technicians who spend most of their days performing related activities, but not managing emergencies. The number of Emergency Management professionals actually assigned to an ERO, are usually less than five percent. Since the EOC is rarely activated even for drills and exercises, it is important that information be constantly available, and easy to use. Systems must always be ready and intuitive to operate. The ERO must transition very quickly from budget meetings, to decisions that may impact lives, property, and very possibly the future of the company or site. Rule: EOC systems should be easy to learn and easy to use.

A modern EOC should be something like this:

Functional Groups assemble within a large room and/or separate “Team Rooms”, capturing and assessing data, converting data to information, and distributing that information into a common system. All information should be universally and simultaneously distributed to all participants. These rooms can have centralized or individual displays consisting of wall displays (front or rear projected), large screen room monitors, and/or individual computer monitors. Each room should also have at least one video camera providing live feed to all other rooms to facilitate conferencing and to assist in determining when key personnel are at their designated positions.

Command and Control elements contain management and essential support staff, who receive and analyze information, and coordinate the decision-making process. Immediate and universal dissemination of decisions is essential. Centralized displays are vital in these rooms (so the group can focus on specific objectives), however individual displays can complement this capability. These facilities usually are large open areas with horseshoe shaped tables oriented to large wall displays with individual computers at each table or at each position. (See drawing for examples).

These tables also facilitate discussion within that functional group. "Adjacency surveys" and a review of local procedures will assist in determining seating arrangements and optimum functional groupings. All traffic flow (access/egress) should occur behind the decision-makers. Typically, data entry and display management should occur from an elevated area at the rear of the room.


An Information Management System (IMS) such as WebEOC, with a support staff capable of gathering all reports about the event, provide the essential information flow. These reports are distributed in the form of status boards displayed side-by-side with maps, charts, video images, Closed Circuit TV, and any other visual source. A voice teleconferencing system that can involve every participant in the assessment and decision-making process is vital to timely information capture and down-channeling instructions and decisions.

The combination of these technologies will provide the equivalent of video teleconferencing featuring eye-to-eye discussion of situations from any room or facility linked to the system.

Example: Many Emergency Management Organizations, such as the Savannah River Site (SRS), utilize a phone conferencing system that allows all members of the various “Functional Groups” to participate in the regularly scheduled “How Goes It” or Update Briefings. At SRS, up to 120 phones can participate simultaneously. The EOC has 96 positions with phones, so if all are participating in the conference that leaves 24 lines available for participants from anywhere in the world to join the conference and review the situation. These conferences can be set up instantly by activating a single number. They can be concluded just as rapidly. The conference operator knows at all times who is participating and the computer generates a full audit trail of all conferees second-by-second. Conferences can be “pre-set” or “ad-hoc”. This means that everyone at your table, and at every other table within the organization is hearing both ends of the discussion. This, of course, leads to rapid and unambiguous communication resulting in rapid decision-making and fewer errors. It also facilitates better protocol. If you want to tell the guy at the end of the room something, you are encouraged to call him, not yell at him. He has a headset on, you have a headset on, simply push his button and he is there. At SRS you will also have a recorded record of the discussion and and a computer generated audit trail of when you called, who you called, and how long you talked.

The IMS should provide access to all known information and rapidly present it to the decision-maker in a format that is easily utilized. Ideally, the information gathering process is continuous. During day-to-day operations when all is normal, various site activities such as the Fire Department, Security Operations, the Occurrence Notification Center, and others are generating logs, reports, and documenting ongoing site activities. If this information can be captured by WebEOC, the IMS will already be populated when the first responder turns on the lights in the EOC, following activation. The displays are activated and everything that is known about the event is already on the screens. Once the facility is staffed and activated the responders can focus exclusively on assessing incoming information, tracking task assignments, and timelines.

The decision-makers should remain in their assigned positions, focused on the information flow, and consulting with their advisors. They never need to leave that position to seek information, attend a briefing, participate in a meeting, or see a display or map. All required materials, conversations, tools or displays should be provided at their position via this centralized display and teleconferencing system.


A brief example of how IMS works!

WebEOC working in conjunction with existing site resources, can provide an all encompassing IMS, meeting every need of the management team. By linking existing site assets such as: telephones, radios, intranet, internet, voice teleconferencing, video, modeling, mapping, and weather systems, Web-EOC can display all images on the various screens, and the attendant systems will integrate all audio paths into one cohesive teleconferencing and display capability. New information entered into WebEOC will be automatically “pushed” to every computer, anywhere in the world, that is logged-on to that display.

Presented in a "true" virtual windows environment, displays are positioned utilizing the "drag n' drop" methodology showing chronological and categorical status boards, side-by-side with maps, charts, live video, and any other feed available. These displays are scaleable and sizeable and can be shown in virtually unlimited numbers on any size screen. Obviously, the larger the screens the more status boards that can be easily read. Displays can be moved, sized, and duplicated on any screen within the system. The source information is provided by a single web database and accessible from any location. Each location can configure the screens to meet their mission requirements at the time, but the important point is that all emergency information is simultaneously provided to all locations.

WebEOC offers the unique advantage of being platform independent. That means, any computer anywhere capable of accessing the network (internet/intranet), can be in this system assuming they have been granted access. No special software except a web browser, and all operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Unix, can communicate data.

EOC Facilities and Systems: Lets begin by discussing in bullet form, “What's in” and “What's out”, in Emergency Operations Centers (EOC's!

WHATS OUT! (in no particular order)

- expensive hardware and software
- going to briefings and searching for information
- phones with ringers and handsets
- maps covered with plastic
- white noise - sidebar discussions in the middle of the floor or in the corner
- more white noise - yelling back and forth from position to position
- overhead task lighting and fluorescents in rooms with projected color displays
- plexiglas status boards, whiteboards, and magic markers
- lawyer furniture (cherry, oak, & mahogany) and high backed chairs
- individual analog clocks all showing a different time
- public address systems, bullhorns, and running from room to room.
- 3 ring binders and stacks of paper
- white asphalt tile and olive drab walls
- personality and Ego driven and circular seating configurations

if any of that sounded familiar, look at WHATS IN! (in no particular order)

- The internet/intranet
- voice and video teleconferencing (recorded)
- phones with lights instead of ringers and, headsets for hands free operation
- automated displays featuring status boards and maps with motion
- raised access flooring for easy installation of telecommunications
- acoustic walls and ceilings, and static-free carpeted floors
- task lighting at each position
- large screen room displays in virtual windows
- systems furniture including ergonomic chairs
- digital clock systems (accurate to a millisecond)
- cameras and video recording
- automated checklists and forms and computerized reference documents
- human factored lighting and colors
- mission driven seating configurations
- Decision-makers that are facing away from traffic flow within the room


Example EOC facility designed by ESi to support a four projector integrated Information Display System plus seating requirements for over 40 Emergency Responders. Note: Projectors are ceiling mounted and all access, egress and traffic flow is at the rear of the facility.
 

State-of-the-art Information Management Systems

In the days of phone and radio messaging and manual/handwritten status boards we lacked the ability to overwhelm the decision-makers with the volume of information we could deliver. Today that has changed! Now we can place hundreds of reporting devices, in the form of portable computers w/cellular modems, right at the event scene and at every location throughout the impacted area. That area could be a DOE site, or a worldwide operation like “Delta Airlines”. We can receive directly from the individual viewing the occurrence, detailed reports, “in their own words” about what they are witnessing. The speed and accuracy of our information flow today was not possible just a few years ago.

The value of injecting information from a trained observer directly into a system and having the information flow to the highest level instantly is the ultimate in efficiency. The elimination of multiple translations and/or “hand offs” eliminates the most common cause of delays and errors. When information is instantly exposed to all other trained observers it will “self validate”.

“Self Validation” is a phenomenon that results from universal sharing of information among trained observers. When a report is released into the system, it is instantly exposed to every member that is logged on. That information is required, (by procedure), to be carefully scrutinized by each observer. If a question arises, each member is trained on how to verify the report. If an error is identified, the correction procedure is immediately implemented. The error is corrected and the system continues. No delays in information flow occurred at any time in this process. Research proves that validation occurs more often and more rapidly in this environment than if reports are intercepted, validated, and then forwarded to the system. In fact it would take a large cadre of many disciplines to carefully review and approve all information flow. With this method the entire organization is involved in the validation process as a part of their fundamental mission and no information is delayed for validation. Only challenged information is reviewed.

Recognizing that today large volumes of information move through the system, we have devised a method for capturing and displaying information in manageable formats. These formats are called “status displays”. There are two basic types: “Chronological” and “Categorical”. Chronological typically is a list of everything that meets the “reportable” criteria. The information enters the system in the order it was sent. It enters the display at the top and gets bumped down as each new report arrives. Some reports can be sorted and filtered but some, such as the “log” sometimes called “Significant Events”, cannot be altered, only corrected. The information flowing to the Chronology can be broken down by category and displayed separately.

An example is the “Personnel” functional group is only responsible for things affecting people: Who is missing? Who is injured? Whose next of kin has been notified? They really don’t care about how many dump trucks we have at the scene. That is a “Logistics” problem. They can look at their board and keep track of the things they are primarily responsible for. Since there is no limit to the numbers of boards you can have, each functional group should have their own board/s. Each group should also have a “Task Assignments” board to keep track of their responsibilities. The important point is Categorical displays provide a convenient place for each discipline to display the information they are managing and share it with any participant that is authorized to view it.

Typical Status Board Displays: Chronological,"Timeline" or "Significant Events"

This display records all reports entered into the system that meet the criteria for entry. Reports are posted in the order received and are referenced by the Time of Receipt (TOR). Typically, the Time of Occurrence (TOC) is recorded in the narrative. If you had only one status board this is the one you would need. These displays can be filtered and sorted as well.

Multiple chronological displays can be maintained. Examples are: A log of all reports to the system can be maintained; a log of “Significant Events” can be maintained; a log of reports by category can also be maintained. Categorical Displays such as those listed below help us manage high volume information flow by breaking it down into functional groups.

Categorical Displays: i.e., “Personnel Status, Logistics, and Task Assignments"

All reports appearing in the chronological display can be reassigned to any appropriate category for ease of use. An example is a report involving an injury to an employee may appear on the "Personnel Status" board. Anyone wanting to locate all the information in the category of personnel status, need only look at this board. Some categorical displays commonly used are: Personnel Status, Response Forces, Logistics, Meteorological Data, and Public Affairs. The "Task Assignments" board is a very useful tool for focusing the groups attention on specific deliverables, tracking commitments, or assigning responsibilities. Each room using this system can develop their own "Task Assignments" board to insure completion of their commitments.

There is no reasonable limit to the number of categorical displays in the system. Each room controls their own displays, and while the data is coming from a common source, for continuity purposes, each room has complete control over the displays they view at that moment in time.

Summary:

Our goal is unambiguous communication and universal dissemination of emergency information to any location, in any facility. Clear, easy to read displays, easy to use systems, and rapid information flow are the keys. Our decision-makers should have at their respective positions all resources required to make the right decision quickly. We believe a picture is worth more than thousands of words, and that a conference call (with all essential elements participating) is much more effective than leaving your position and your advisors to go to a meeting. The same conference call serves the down-channel reporting requirement far better than a unilateral public address announcement. WebEOC is the essential ingredient that glues all the important pieces together and makes the sum far greater than its parts. When combined with sound facility design and an integrated display system it provides the most advanced IMS capability available anywhere, at any price.

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