Approximately 10,000 times each year, the State Warning Point in the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) in Tallahassee, Fla., is notified of a potentially hazardous situation requiring coordination of government resources. The State Warning Point is a communications hub within the SEOC where highly trained staff quickly “triage” incoming events, classify them by type and severity and route them to the right responders. The State Warning Point is a single point of emergency response contact for all Florida government agencies at every level including local, state and national. Decision makers at the state, federal and local agency level are notified and often make their way to the SEOC to participate in helping those in need. The parking space for Gov. Jeb Bush is often occupied, because the SEOC is the nerve center for statewide operations. The SEOC enables the governor and key staff members to play a hands-on role in delivering the right resources to respond to any emergency. The SEOC never sits dormant, but the activity level expands during major events and disasters, such as hurricanes. Participants from many agencies come to the SEOC to fulfill their roles. As stated on the Department of Emergency Management’s SEOC’s official website www.floridadisaster.org, the mission of the state EOC is to “Ensure that Florida is prepared to respond to emergencies, recover from them and mitigate against their impacts.”
Hitting the road
Florida’s roads and bridges are often the focus of an emergency and are always a part of the solution to any disaster. When transportation is disrupted, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) takes action. Many of the thousands of events handled by the SEOC land squarely in the lap of the department of transportation. FDOT assigns personnel to the SEOC who receive the data from the State Warning Point and create “missions” for DOT personnel to carry out in the field. Hurricane Frances alone created over 4,400 tracked actions for FDOT, each requiring response and many requiring monitoring and subsequent actions. In the quadruple-threat hurricane summer of 2004 (Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne), FDOT had to make use of every resource available, prioritize needs and shift resources to higher priorities. Intelligent transportation systems elements of traffic counters, variable message boards and traffic-control devices were resources frequently requested and used to accomplish the essential missions of the department. The vast network of highways crisscrossing Florida coast-to-coast, including many critical infrastructure elements such as key bridges, play a role in nearly every emergency response.
Congestion=TMC backup
FDOT operates its own emergency operations center at FDOT headquarters in Tallahassee during major emergencies. The FDOT EOC focuses on fulfilling FDOT’s responsibilities under the FEMA emergency support functions and incident command system. In addition to the dedicated EOC, FDOT has undertaken a mission of establishing Regional Transportation Management Centers (RTMCs) in each of its major urbanized areas and corridors. Currently, RTMCs are operational in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando and West Palm Beach.
The Florida Turnpike Enterprise has two operational RTMCs, one in South Florida and one in Central Florida. The RTMCs focus on both incident management (nonrecurring congestion) and daily commuter and tourism traffic (recurring congestion). According to data from the Texas Transportation Institute, Florida has the sixth-most congested very large urban area in the U.S. in Miami, and the nation’s ninth- and 11th-most congested large cities in Tampa and Orlando, respectively. Incidents in these areas turn an already congested roadway network into instantaneous gridlock that can last for hours.
The traffic congestion trend for Florida cities is getting worse, mainly due to the rapid population growth in Florida, which increased nearly 24% in the 1990s according to U.S. Census data. To respond to this growth and increasing congestion, there are new RTMCs coming on line in South Florida for Florida DOT’s District 6 in Miami and District 4 in Broward County. There also are new RTMCs being designed in Tampa and Ft. Myers, and RTMCs being planned in Tallahassee and Pensacola. In addition to the RTMC, FDOT has “satellite” transportation management centers, one operational in Daytona and one planned for Sarasota.
Natural and man-made reaction
In general, state DOTs have a well defined role for emergency response, including a somewhat limited role as first responders. At the national level, state DOTs are seen as infrastructure owners and are responsible for clean-up and repair as a support function to emergency operations. At the state level, DOTs agree with the concept of being seen as infrastructure owners. In Florida, the DOT sees an expanded role also as being the maintainers and operators of highways. Responsibility for effective day-to-day operation of the highways means getting involved in incident and emergency management. In Florida, the state DOT is actively involved in detection, assessment, response and recovery of highway facilities. In addition to traffic accidents, construction and maintenance activities that effect the roadway, the FDOT RTMCs are prepared to participate actively in the response to emergencies.
FDOT RTMCs also are involved in off-highway emergencies that have traffic consequences, such as a plane crash, severe weather, fires and large special events and gatherings. Preparedness for natural and man-made (terrorism) disasters has refocused plans for highway and bridge infrastructure incidents. A recent example of the preparedness paying off is how FDOT was able to quickly reopen the I-10 bridge near Pensacola after Hurricane Ivan destroyed a substantial portion of the structure.
The FEMA Federal Response Plan includes 12 Emergency Support Functions (ESFs), and those have been adapted and expanded to 17 as part of Florida’s Comprehensive Emergency Response Plan:
- ESF 1 - Transportation
- ESF 2 - Communications
- ESF 3 - Public Works and Engineering
- ESF 4 - Firefighting
- ESF 5 - Information and Planning
- ESF 6 - Mass Care
- ESF 7 - Resources
- ESF 8 - Health and Medical Services
- ESF 9 - Search and Rescue
- ESF 10 - Hazardous Materials
- ESF 11 - Food and Water
- ESF 12 - Energy
- ESF 13 - Military Support
- ESF 14 - Public Information
- ESF 15 - Volunteers and Donations
- ESF 16 - Law Enforcement and Security
- ESF 17 - Animal Protection and Agriculture
RTMCs play a critical role in fulfilling FDOT missions to provide ESF 1 and 3, and in the case of the joint operations centers where FHP and FDOT are located in the same facility, ESF 16 is covered as well in the same center.
They’ll be hooked
FDOT is well on its way toward planning statewide connectivity of its key centers. All RTMCs will have redundant and reliable high-speed data connections to share data, including digital streaming video. These RTMCs also are planned to be connected to the state EOC, creating the ability for the SEOC to have streaming video images from highway surveillance cameras around the state available, especially during an emergency.
“We are upgrading and using a powerful network of statewide microwave communications towers along with fiber-optic segments to form backbone links between our major centers,” said Nick Adams, FDOT telecommunications director.
Also exciting is the potential of providing network access to ITS devices statewide. Variable-message signs, traffic-count stations and pan-tilt-zoom video cameras installed for traffic management become invaluable and shareable resources during emergencies.
Florida’s ITS C2C Network will meet several baseline everyday needs. The network will facilitate enhanced corridor incident management involving multiple urbanized areas. Information to be shared on the network will include event details, response plans, live images of the event, device status and responder coordination details.
Connectivity of centers serves government agencies at all levels, including local/regional, statewide and national. The ITS C2C network will provide a single point of access to ITS devices statewide for the SEOC. Using dedicated hardware and software, the SEOC will be able to tap FDOT as a single information source regardless of the geographic region. At the local level, city and county traffic departments will be connected with the state RTMC to enable sharing of data and video for the accomplishment of coordinated response to incidents and emergencies.
Sharing of vital information among agencies at the local level will help enable the coordination and balancing of traffic between freeways, expressways and local arterial routes. At an inter-regional level, for example, between two adjacent urban areas, major incident management will involve coordination of adjacent agencies. At the statewide level, connectivity provides the capability of managing large-scale population evacuations that may involve reversing or “one-laning” freeways, and monitoring traffic activity during evacuation and then recovery.
In 2004 the Florida DOT implemented a pilot project for the C2C network by connecting two major RTMCs, Jacksonville and Orlando. The operational purpose of the pilot project was focused on sharing information and ITS devices in Daytona, an area that involves both regions. Major special events in Daytona can attract well over 100,000 people, and traffic disruptions are felt as far away as Jacksonville on I-95 and Orlando on I-4. The pilot link enabled the sharing of information from devices connected to the network so that managers in Jacksonville and Orlando know what’s headed their way in terms of traffic volume.
FDOT is nearing completion of an upgrade of the statewide microwave communications network to increase the available bandwidth, enabling greater use of the network for new initiatives such as those necessary to support ITS deployment. Until such time that fiber trunks are in place on interurban corridors, a hybridized (wireless and wire-line combined) statewide network of telecommunications technologies will serve ITS deployments. The word “hybrid” is used to describe a network that consists of both state-owned wireless (regulated microwave) and state-owned wire-line (fiber) communications media, with media conversion capability that allows the hybridized network to function as a wide-area network (WAN). This new hybridized ITS WAN will be characterized by microwave trunking between “last-node” fiber terminations of the center to field (C2F) facilities constructed by FDOT and last-mile connections where necessary to connect microwave facilities to RTMCs.
The C2C network will grow over time as new RTMCs come online. The C2C network will transmit ITS data and streaming video, ultimately linking all centers and local area networks including roadside dynamic message signs, data collection devices and video cameras. The successful pilot project to link the RTMC in Orlando with the RTMC in Jacksonville uses the hybridized network concept. This pilot project demonstrated the ability to establish the last-mile connectivity at a reasonable cost and deploy the media conversion capabilities to enable the transmission of data and video over the pilot project link.
Although the Internet provides an omnipresent and inexpensive communications media for voice, emergency managers recognize there are pitfalls associated with reliance upon the Internet alone for emergency communications. The Internet does not provide guaranteed bandwidth and may not be appropriate for real-time command and control of devices. In general, Internet connections are less reliable than a private network, have limited video capability and lessened security. Importantly, the Internet tends to be most overworked when it is most needed and may be less available as the need increases during emergencies.
A future in sharing
Clearly the efforts under way to reliably connect emergency and transportation management centers in Florida are essential for providing continuity of government services for emergency management. C2C network designers envision an eventual statewide Ethernet solution with “IP Addressable” ITS devices on a vast WAN. Migration toward this best-case solution will take years, and in the interim the use of hybridized networks will provide considerable utility and greatly enhance FDOT and emergency manager’s capability to respond to disasters. The benefits of these connections will be to fully integrate emergency and day-to-day capabilities for sharing real-time video images and data and roadside ITS devices. The network also will create an unprecedented capability for shared staffing and backup remote control of centers.
TME
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