Nationwide New Zealand CAD
By Julian D Kardos
On Feb. 22, 2011, a devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand only 5 km deep and almost directly under the city of Christchurch. Almost 200 people were killed, and thousands more were injured. Most of the destruction occurred in the center of the city where a quarter of all commercial buildings and thousands of homes were damaged to the point of demolition.
Computer simulations of similar quakes run prior to the actual disaster predicted a much higher death toll for Christchurch, New Zealand’s second most populous city. What the computer models didn’t take into account, however, was how remarkably well prepared the New Zealand public safety services were to continue functioning in the face of such a disaster.
The Country
Divided into two islands, New Zealand covers 270,000 square kilometers and is home to more than 4 million people. The national New Zealand Fire Service and New Zealand Police protect the residents and properties. New Zealand’s three Ambulance Communications Centres dispatch the country’s fleet of more than 600 ambulances, 250 rural doctors and nurses, more than 40 emergency helicopters, Coast Guard and other modes of response. They also coordinate patient transfer services for district health boards.1 Prior to the 2007 unification of communications systems, Police and Fire had segmented the nation into three catchment areas, centered on Christchurch, Auckland and the capital city of Wellington.
New Zealand moved into the era of computer-aided dispatch (CAD) for both Police and Fire in the 1990s. However, each jurisdictional comm center operated different models of CAD systems that were capable of sharing information but not configured to give each center a nationwide view of emergency events without manual event transfers. Each facility had its own underlying database with dynamic backup. The biggest weakness in the design was the inability of dispatchers in one jurisdiction to help those in another during a widespread emergency event.
Nationalizing Emergency Communications
In 1996, the New Zealand Fire and Police services decided to run their individual emergency calltaking and dispatching functions from three separate comm centers, with a common CAD and telephony system, and using the Police radio network. Covering the entire country, the goal was to improve operational performance and efficiency. Until then, regional comm centers had lacked sufficient interoperability to allow continuous operations if one region had a catastrophe.
Once the decision was made to create the unified Police and Fire Communications and Resource Deployment (CARD) network, New Zealand selected Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., to implement its I/CAD product. New Zealand had already been operating Intergraph CAD systems since 1996. The I/CAD product was designed specifically to handle calltaking and dispatching for multiple public safety agencies with thousands of vehicles spread over a large geographic area. The implementation included a nationwide digital map capable of supporting planned GPS-based automatic vehicle location (AVL) inputs.
When creating a national communications network, the most important feature of the CAD is scalability. Under normal operating conditions, telecommunicators in each of the three comm centers view the event lists, call-outs and emergency vehicle movements only for their region. In times of crisis, though, the CAD enables supervisors to shift the coverage areas displayed on workstations, allowing communications personnel to zoom out to a nationwide view or focus on a single city, with dispatch functionality scaling appropriately.
In 2007, Police and Fire, which had been operating on a local area network (LAN), switched over to a wide area network (WAN), allowing a unified communications network with the same CAD, telephony and radio components—though New Zealand emergency communications still essentially operate as three independent regional centers in normal situations. The unified architecture and shared database enable the three regional facilities to expand or shrink their coverage areas on the fly if one suddenly finds itself overloaded with incoming emergency calls.
To ensure continuous availability of the I/CAD data following the move of CARD from the LAN to the WAN, Intergraph implemented the Oracle Data Guard database solution for management of real-time and historical event information on behalf of both Police and Fire. The primary database is located in Auckland, with backup servers placed nearly 500 km. away in Wellington. The Oracle technology keeps the two databases in sync to within seconds of each other.
“If the primary database goes down, the backup kicks in and continues delivering data to I/CAD within four minutes,” says Iain Lynn, Southern Communications Centre manager for New Zealand Fire Service. “Data Guard allows us to never totally go down.”
During the 2011 event, the two centers not affected by the quake assumed some calltaking and dispatch duties for the overwhelmed Christchurch facility by accessing its event list and viewing its deployment maps onscreen. Public safety officials credit the communications system’s ability to share information and functionality across the nation in real time as the event unfolded and the fact that none of the components failed as crucial factors in keeping the death toll relatively low.
“[The earthquake] proved the power of the virtual nationalized system,” says Lynn.
Virtualized Emergency Communications
In 1996, New Zealand established three joint public safety control rooms—one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch—to house Police and Fire dispatchers and calltakers under the same roofs, each with double-redundant power sources. Although all calltaking and dispatch terminals run off the same CAD system, their terminal interfaces have been customized for either Police or Fire functionality.
A nationwide fiber-optic line running north and south the length of New Zealand along a major railroad route provides the primary data communications link for the three comm centers. The cable loops back on itself repeatedly for diversion purposes in case of a break, the CARD network also maintains two backup data communications links, one of which is wireless.
Just prior to the earthquake, Police and Fire had started to implement a nationwide digital radio network for enhanced security. Police use it to dispatch cruisers by voice command, and officers in the field respond by voice to report their status, which the dispatchers note on the map display. Fire stations and vehicles rely on an encoded messaging system to receive call-out orders and update their status and locations automatically to the CAD display via radio tone signaling.
To support the scalable CAD, New Zealand also installed a nationwide Solidus 7 phone system for the comm centers. This system has the ability to equalize call volumes among the three facilities. Working in either an automatic or a manual mode, the system senses when too many calls are coming into one center and diverts them to available call takers in one of the other two control rooms.
The New Zealand Ambulance Service largely continues to use its own CAD system, but in 2009 it opted to participate in the CARD network by means of the Intergraph InterCAD product. This integration tool serves as a bridge between I/CAD and the third-party ambulance CAD. InterCAD enables event data sharing between the systems. It is currently configured for the Police, Fire and ambulance communications staffs to have the details of mutual response events posted in text format on their display screens so that each agency has the incident on screen and can take appropriate actions.
Surviving a Direct Hit
In the years leading up to the 2011 earthquake, New Zealand experienced thousands of tremors and temblors; the invaluable lessons learned were integrated into the Business Continuity Plans (BCP) maintained and practiced weekly by Police and Fire personnel. When the major quake struck Christchurch during the noon hour on a Tuesday, it took the Southern Communications Centre less than eight minutes to assess the situation and enact the appropriate contingency plan.
“The comm center looked like a bomb site—things that weren’t strapped down came crashing down,” says Kieran Kortegast, manager of the Police Southern Communications Centre. “The great thing was our Intergraph system and all our servers kept on running, and our staff were unhurt and able to keep working.”
A quick assessment revealed that the Christchurch Central Police station where the Southern Communications Centre is located had sustained only cosmetic damage and the Police and Fire CAD, phone and radio systems in Christchurch were all still functioning. In addition, the primary communications link to the CAD database in Auckland was intact.
Within minutes, the volume of incoming calls tripled, and their geographic distribution confirmed the Christchurch Metropolitan District was the hardest hit. The local ambulance service, however, had lost its CAD, and the New Zealand Civil Defence Agency had lost its ability to communicate with Police and Fire in Christchurch.
“We learned after an earlier quake on Sept. 4, 2010, that the center with all the damage should divest the bulk of its work to the other centers, to allow concentration on the rescue and recovery operation,” says Lynn.
Shifting all other calltaking and dispatching responsibilities in the CAD to the Wellington and Auckland centers allowed Southern Communications Centre operators to focus solely on emergency response within the Christchurch Metropolitan District. For Police, this also included sending some dispatch services under the BCP to a few 24/7 district police stations as fallback sites. Because they had practiced repeatedly in the past, the telecommunicators in Northern Communications Centre and Central Communications Centre and at the fallback sites were able to step in seamlessly and responded to events as easily as if they were sitting in the Christchurch center.
Even with the suburban and rural calls diverted, however, the Christchurch workload was significant. Telecommunicators in that control room could triage calls and assign them to appropriate Police and Fire crews, but they also found themselves tracking ambulance requests manually and communicating with Civil Defence via runners. With its communications facilities fully operational, the Christchurch center became the hub of response activities in the city.
“We were the crucial link in keeping the emergency rescue and response operations running,” says Kortegast.
Under normal conditions, the Police Service operates three digital voice radio channels in Canterbury, the district surrounding Christchurch. In the aftermath of the quake, Police Southern Communications Centre telecommunicators continued to run these radio channels, and an extra channel was activated in Christchurch to prevent voice traffic from overloading the system. Due to the workload, each channel was shared by two Police dispatchers in the center.
A tense moment came late in the evening on Feb. 22, when the comm center was informed that both backup CAD server links had been destroyed in the quake. The surviving primary link, a fiber-optic cable, was deemed tenuous at best because a large building above it was nearing collapse. Remarkably, the building held out until the telecommunications company could reroute the lines the next day.
“Our business continuity plan even accounted for losing all three CAD server links,” says Lynn. “We would have run the CAD [from] our training server.”
In the hours after the earthquake, Police and Fire in the stricken area each had anywhere from six to 24 calltakers and dispatchers in Southern Communications Centre triaging about 1,200 emergency calls and deploying personnel through the nationalized CAD. Within 18 hours, rescue vehicles and crews from other districts arrived inChristchurchto assist with event response. From that point, the number of pending events began to decrease.
“In most of these situations, the best we can do is answer the calls,” says Kortegast, “but we actually achieved our target service levels [during the quake and its aftermath].”
Community Reassurance
Looking back on the 2011 earthquake, Lynn and Kortegast remain impressed with two factors. First, the public safety personnel in the Christchurch comm center performed their duties professionally and with dedication, putting others before themselves. Second, they were amazed that all critical communications infrastructure withstood the shaking of the quake. Kortegast believes this fact goes beyond proving the value of a nationalized CAD so that there is real-time resilience across the entire country.
“This is where the public trust and confidence in emergency services came very strongly to the fore. Our systems and platforms kept on running, and we kept on running as well,” Kortegast says.
Julian D. Kardos is the Intergraph Corp. account manager for the New Zealand Police and New Zealand Fire Service.
References
1. Comms Centre Technology: www.111.govt.nz/technology/no_of_calls_ambulance.html
This article originally appeared in April 2012 Public Safety Communications.