District Looks to Lead the Way in Crisis Technology
Pilot System Lets Safety Officials Communicate Even When Other Networks Fail
Fire officials, from left, Demetrios Vlassopoulos, John Donnelly and Brian K. Lee watch broadband images of a fire. The District has worked on improving communications for emergency personnel.
(Lois Raimondo / Post)
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Thursday, August 16, 2007; Page DZ01
On Sept. 11, 2001, the cellphone network in the Washington area was quickly overloaded as frantic residents dialed relatives and friends. Now, the District is trying to develop a high-tech wireless network for public safety officials, allowing them to talk and send live video and images even if private networks are bogged down.
D.C. officials say they hope to speed the system's development with a new $12 million grant from the federal government to improve emergency communications.
"Unlike 9/11, when all of the systems went down . . . we would have this network strictly for public safety folks," said Darrell L. Darnell, the District's homeland security director.
A pilot of the system has been running in the District for two years. Known as the Wireless Accelerated Responder Network (WARN), it was pronounced a success by the U.S. Commerce Department recently, despite a few problems.
"Our nation's capital has the potential to be the template for satisfying the nation's public safety broadband needs," said Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.
The idea for the system developed after the Sept. 11 attacks. District officials were working to upgrade the radio network used by police and firefighters, and they began to ponder what equipment would be needed next.
"If you just sit back as a technologist and look at it, you can see the industry and communications are going in the way of data becoming more and more important," said Robert LeGrande II, the city's chief technology officer. "We anticipated at that time [that] just like we had these voice networks, we were going to need these data networks."
The District used $2.8 million from a federal grant to start building the next new thing: a high-speed broadband wireless network just for law enforcement and emergency workers. It was aimed at allowing such workers to send and download big chunks of data, such as real-time video, blueprints of buildings, mug shots, fingerprints and maps of city fire hydrants.
Communications towers were set up throughout the city; 200 users were given subscriber devices.
The system went online just before President Bush's second inauguration, in 2005. One of the experiments that day involved attaching a camera to a vehicle in the presidential motorcade, LeGrande said. It beamed back video over the WARN system, allowing the Secret Service to monitor the cars from an operations center.
"From a security standpoint, it was more reliable" than using a commercial network, LeGrande said. And, in a crisis, other networks might have slowed, he said.
The WARN system hasn't been utilized just for national security events. Federal and local officials have used it to monitor Fourth of July crowds in downtown Washington. Emergency workers turned to the system during the mercury spill at Cardozo Senior High School in Northwest in 2005.
