By Steve Martini

The Snow Basin dispatch team, with Weber Area Dispatch Center Operations Manager Kim McAllister (front left)

In August, the eyes of the world turn to London, England—the host city for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Nearly a million spectators, volunteers, athletes, organizers and media members will descend on the banks of the River Thames for two event-filled weeks. According to 9-1-1 professionals in Utah who’ve been through this before, planning and preparing for safety began several years ago.

When a city hosts the Olympics, myriad details need to be worked out, from establishing a reliable radio infrastructure to scheduling dispatchers to staff consoles at venues and PSAPs.

Kim McAllister, operations manager at Weber Area Dispatch and 9-1-1 Emergency Services District in Ogden, Utah, attended her first meeting with Utah Olympic Public Safety Command (UOPSC) in 1997—five years before Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Games.

“Preparation for this type of event starts long before the event takes place,” she says. “Once the Games were awarded, I believe the committees started forming and meeting right away.”

Division of Labor

The Salt Lake Olympic area connected five cities in a ring 70 miles long and 50 miles wide, connecting 13 venues. In addition, various groups created “non-competition sites” for parties or events, drawing large crowds who needed to be monitored and observed by public safety.

McAllister and the Weber Area dispatchers were responsible for emergency communications at the north end of the “ring,” handling the Giant Slalom and downhill events at Snow Basin Ski Resort, as well as the curling events at Weber State University.

One hour south, Salt Lake City police and fire dispatchers were responsible for two event venues—figure skating and ice hockey at Energy Solutions Arena—as well as the main media center and VIP hotel, and the Olympic Village and the Olympic Stadium, used for opening and closing ceremonies, both at the University of Utah.

Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC) dispatchers handled communications for speed skating and the agency command center.

Four thousand feet above the Salt Lake Valley, in Summit County, dispatchers worked 12-hour shifts, six days straight while handling calls at four venues hosting six events—the bobsleigh, luge, ski jump, alpine skiing, snowboarding and free-style skiing competitions.

“I remember almost every call during that time qualified as being Olympic related,” says Lt. Melanie Crittenden, who works as a dispatcher for the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in Park City, Utah. “Waiting in the parking lot for a shuttle to take them where to go; large parties at residences calling 9-1-1 for any sort of assistance; traffic control.”

The swell of visitors, athletes and dignitaries also brought a surge of first responders inside the Salt Lake Olympic area.

“I worked graveyards and handled radio traffic for all the troopers in the area,” Crittenden recalls. [They came] from all over to assist during this time. They made several arrests.”

Throughout the process, communications remained first in mind rather than an afterthought.

“The great thing is dispatchers were very involved from the beginning,” McAllister says. “My challenge was to staff two satellite offices and figure out the working schedule for the main center, [so] as to not interrupt service to the agencies or the citizens.”

Weber dispatchers were used to working 10-hour shifts, so McAllister drafted a 21-day schedule, staffing eight dispatchers at both venues while maintaining regular staffing at the main center. At the time, 48 dispatchers worked at the center, leaving McAllister only 32 to staff the main center for three weeks.

“I was able to work out their schedule so they did 12-hour days with two days off each week,” she says. “Everything from the northern end of the venue would go into Weber Dispatch, as well as all of the dispatching for Morgan and Weber counties.”

Dispatchers at specific venues worked in trailers set up specifically for communications. They worked alongside police and fire commanders, FBI and Secret Service agents.

Dispatchers at the main center clerked calls generating from the venues, then funneled calls to the appropriate venue dispatcher to handle. Dispatchers at the venue operated on the same CAD system as those at the main center. Weber Area Dispatch created specific jurisdictions within the CAD system to direct calls to dispatchers based on the venue’s address.

“At the satellite centers, no emergency calls came in,” McAllister says. “The phones up there were used for calling the main office, calling the different venues or getting a hold of a commander.”

UOPSC installed software—E-Team—at all PSAPs hosting an Olympic venue, allowing all dispatchers to see and share information that might affect everyone.

“For example, an accident southbound on I-15 closing two lanes would have been put in the information database and checked by all the dispatchers on a regular basis,” McAllister explains.

Volunteer dispatchers from all over the nation came to assist with data entry into E-Team at a console at VECC. The position was staffed around the clock throughout the Games.

In Salt Lake County, dispatchers at two separate PSAPs handled things a little differently.

“We had specific channels or talk groups monitored for the different venues in the city,” says Roxanne Cheever, director of Salt Lake City Police Department’s dispatch center. “Dispatchers monitored these channels as part of their daily assignments.”

Salt Lake City police dispatchers worked five 12-hour shifts per week, with two days off, for a month. Day shift dispatchers opted to avoid the crowds, took up a collection and made meals in the dispatch center—usually breakfast or lunch each day—while midnight shift dispatchers signed up to bring meals each night.

“It was great to work with each other,” recalls Salt Lake City Fire Dispatch Shift Supervisor Laurie Wilson-Bell. “It was a very good feeling working together and making things work out. It was fun to have the whole world here.”

When the 2002 Games were still in the planning stages, there was some confusion about how venues would be staffed and by whom.

“At one time, one of our battalion chiefs said, ‘We’d like to have a dispatcher on the scene. We’d like to get you to come over to the event centers and volunteer to dispatch!’” Wilson-Bell recalls, laughingly. “Volunteer? You want us to volunteer to do our own jobs? That’s not going to happen. We might volunteer to drive vans or work at concessions, but we’re not going to volunteer to do our own jobs.”

Handling the calls directly from the comm center worked out just fine, she says. Within the fire department’s dispatch center, Wilson-Bell added one additional console to the existing three scheduled dispatchers. The person working overtime was assigned to monitor Olympic-specific radio talk groups for the fire department.

Salt Lake City and VECC dispatchers zoned calls similarly to Weber Area Dispatch, using specifically created “Olympic zones” to route calls to the appropriate dispatcher based on the venue’s location. All calls for service were directed to officers or security assigned to work the venues.

Call Volume

Call volumes increased but were handled with ease, according to the dispatchers sending out the calls, by crews already stationed at the venues.

“The call volumes weren’t overwhelming,” says Linda Bates, a midnight shift dispatcher with Salt Lake City Fire Department. “There were a lot of medic crews at the venue, and I think that’s why we weren’t overwhelmed. Whatever could be handled separately and didn’t have to come through us was handled right there.”

The same was true at VECC.

“The call volume was far lower than everyone anticipated,” says VECC Emergency Operations Coordinator Beth Todd. “Our call volume was actually down close to 20% for those 16 days.”

“Our responders handled a lot of calls and got case numbers from us, but they took care of a lot of the calls because they were right there [at the venues],” Wilson-Bell added. “There was plenty going on around town at the time.”

Security & Code of Conduct

“Because of security at the venues, anything inside the security fence had to be handled by the personnel or apparatus that [were] already credentialed and assigned to be working in the venue,” Todd says. “Security did not allow for personnel or apparatus to just come and go as they pleased, so unless something significant happened and more equipment was necessary, units stationed ‘outside the fence’ took care of the other calls, even if it was just on the other side of the fence.”

Any dispatchers, supervisors and managers requiring access to work or supervise employees at a venue or the Agency Command Center needed first to be credentialed.

“The credentialing process was quite extensive and complicated,” Todd says. “At the time, some misdemeanors were allowable for employees to work at VECC. However, with credentialing they all had to be completely expunged or the person was not allowed access to the various command and control centers. If they were not able to get everything expunged, they could not work at one of the venues or VECC during those 16 days.”

This issue required a change to VECC’s Code of Conduct policy.

Training

VECC dispatchers worked 12-hour shifts for 16 days during the Olympics, staffing positions at the main center as well as the agency command center.

Fire and EMS calls were handled at the main center at two consoles dedicated specifically to the venue and agency command center. Dispatchers sent calls to specific apparatus assigned to certain venues. Law enforcement calls were sent to dispatchers assigned to work specific venues and dispatch the units on scene. Dispatchers at each venue updated the agency command center of all working incidents.

Before anyone headed to work during the Olympics, they underwent training. Each dispatcher learned how the response process worked, specifically inside and outside the security fences. Those deployed to a venue received even more training regarding the command structure and how to make proper notifications. Dispatchers at the main center were tasked with notifying the agency command center of any Olympic-related incidents outside the security fence, such as threats or suspicious circumstances.

That wasn’t always easy.

Not Business as Usual

“The biggest source of chaos was the influx of people—not only the athletes and families—but there were a lot of law enforcement professionals,” McAllister says. “Homeland Security officials were here, and it was a new organization. The FBI was here. Secret Service was here. Understanding whose authority was most important depended on who it dealt with, such as heads of state or athletes, etc.”

Once the Games began, dispatchers and supervisors had daily briefings.

At every agency, anything not related to basic operations ceased. Personal leave requests were denied, overtime was mandatory, quality assurance and improvement were suspended, and no additional training took place.

“Within our offices, we were focused on making sure we had enough staffing,” Bates remembers. “Our administration and supervisors made sure we were well-staffed. This contributed to the safety of our residents and our visitors.”

Five months before the games began, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shook everyone’s confidence and threatened to derail well-laid plans.

“There was a high concern for everyone’s safety,” Crittenden says.

Cheever says, “Citizens were asked to be vigilant and report any suspicious activity. We had a big concern about mass protests from domestic terrorist groups and anarchists. All of our personnel went through special training specific to the possibility of terrorists and terrorism activities. We had cement barricades put in front of the building to avoid any possibility of a vehicle being driven through the front doors and used as a weapon.”

Most dispatchers today say they were underwhelmed during the Olympics.

“If you ask many of the people who worked in the dispatch office during that time,” Cheever says, “they would classify the [activity surrounding the] Olympics as a lot of hype and excitement beforehand and boring once the time arrived.”

Boring days were the product of a lot of good preplanning, says McAllister. “Years and years of planning went into this event.”

“Overall, the whole thing went very smoothly for us,” Todd says. “Communication and information sharing between all of the sites worked very well, and we definitely benefitted from the more than two years spent planning for the Olympics.”

In fact, the scariest moment of the Games occurred one night when an alcohol vendor couldn’t serve a crowd of several thousand looking for a drink. The incident—termed the “Bud World Riot”—lasted only a few hours before officers fully dispersed the crowd and arrested a few dozen unruly participants.

Nothing to Fear

Certainly, dispatchers in England are filled with anxiety and anticipation as the world turns its gaze to London next month. According to dispatchers in Utah, they have nothing to fear. Utah officials are already exploring a bid to host the Winter Olympics again in coming years.

STEPHEN MARTINI oversees training and quality assurance at the Hamilton County 9-1-1 District, where he’s worked since 2004. Before joining public safety, Martini was a newspaper journalist. He also operates a business, creating custom, response-based dispatch simulators for 9-1-1 agencies. Contact him at martini_s@hc911.org.

Originally published in July 2012 Public Safety Communications, the official magazine of APCO International.