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Full-time and volunteer firefighters in Austin, Texas and surrounding agencies had their hands full on the morning of last February 18th, when a man angry at the IRS decided to crash his plan into their building on Research Boulevard in downtown Austin. The resulting 2-alarm fire brought a large response of fire, police, and medical units from numerous agencies, whose priorities were evacuating the building and controlling the blaze. Only two injuries - plus the death of the angry pilot - were reported.

Cisco’s IP Interoperability Collaboration System Improves Situational Awareness and Collaboration among First Responders With Rich-Media Incident Communications

Further extending its Connected Physical Security portfolio, Cisco has announced the Cisco® IP Interoperability Collaboration System (IPICS) 4.0 to provide those on the front lines of safety and security with a new way to view, assess and coordinate action for an emergency situation. An intelligent network system that integrates disparate push-to-talk radio together with voice, video, and data networks, Cisco IPICS 4.0 now puts the power of live mobile video and multimedia-enhanced communications into the hands of public safety officials and security personnel from universities and schools, critical infrastructure agencies, businesses, and other first-responder organizations.

Featuring newly integrated IP-based dispatch console and mobile client applications, IPICS 4.0 allows multiple safety and security organizations to quickly share vital incident information, including live mobile video, across previously isolated radio networks. Cisco IPICS is tightly integrated with Cisco Connected Physical Security solutions with extensive built-in support for interoperability. Its Web services APIs can easily trigger or receive communications from Cisco Video Surveillance and Cisco Physical Access Control or third-party applications, further enhancing situational awareness, response time, operational efficiency and cross-agency collaboration during a critical event.

The Troutman Fire & Rescue Department in North Carolina received a call from OnStar about an accident on a busy interstate. They thought it could have been a false report because none else had reported the accident. With the help of OnStar, the First Responders learned the vehicle skidded off the road and down a ravine. No one else reported the accident because it could not be seen from the interstate. OnStar was able to direct the firefighters to the location of the vehicle while advising the dispatcher that there were multiple points of impact and that the driver was unresponsive.

full story: http://onstarconnections.com/crashesemergencies-2/automatic-crash-response-assists-first-responders/.

- Web News/9-1-1 Magazine

Natl Incident Dispatch Assn Segues Into Web Resource Center

After four years as a formal association, the President of the National Incident Dispatcher Association (NIDA) has announced that the organization has taken a new move into cyberspace.

Chuck Berdan, NIDA President, stated that the organization will be moving their Incident Dispatcher resources into a stand-alone website, to be named the Incident Dispatcher Resource Center (IDRC).
"We’ve realized that Incident Dispatchers needed a resource library where they could download Standard Operations Procedures, current forms and publications, and see deployments in near real-time", said Berdan. "While NIDA provided Incident Dispatchers with the ability to be members of an association, we felt that we could contribute even more to the concept by having a website that anyone with an interest in Incident Dispatch could access."

The NIDA Board recently voted to formally dissolve the Association, and combine their Incident Dispatcher resources into the IDRC website. As President, Berdan has mixed emotions about saying goodbye to NIDA.

"I would have to say that this was a hard decision, but a practical one. We are all being asked to do more with less these days, and that makes it harder to find the time to devote to specialized projects like NIDA. I hope that we can put enough effort into the new IDRC website to make it a useful tool for those agencies who are looking to start an incident or tactical dispatch team, or even teams that are already in place and are looking for better ways of doing things."

The new IDRC website will retain the same domain name as the former NIDA site (www.incidentdispatch.net) and will be managed by Incident Dispatchers Dave Larton and Randall Larson. They will be rolling out the redesigned IDRC site in the coming weeks.

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