Little shock value

By all accounts, the Super Bowl held in Houston on Feb. 1, 2004, was an unqualified success (except for a halftime clothing malfunction). This was an event that had a huge national as well as international audience. According to authorities, the city of Houston was host to an estimated 1 million visitors attending a two-week schedule of pregame parties and activities, with 70,000-plus coming for game day.

Planning a party of such scope and national interest required the best that Houston had to offer. Traffic management and security were two issues considered crucial to the execution of this experience, and Houston was ready to handle both thanks to the foresight of its four major government agencies and some valuable lessons learned from the 2001 tropical storm Allison event.

In 1993 the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), Harris County, the city of Houston and the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO) combined resources to form a consortium. The group christened TranStar, a system that not only established a joint transportation management center but also incorporated the city of Houston and Harris County emergency management organizations. In fact, Houston TranStar was the first center in the nation to combine traffic management and emergency management in one center. TranStar’s mission is “to provide highly effective transportation and emergency management services through the combined use of our collective resources to maximize safety and mobility to the public.” Over the last 11 years, the four participating agencies not only have been committed to implementing the principle of leveraging resources to benefit all the agencies, but also to establishing institutional relationships based on communication and cooperation which is to be envied by others.

High winds prep for heavy fan load

The success of hosting the Super Bowl required that institutional team spirit, access to the best technology and a level of communication between transportation and security personnel that TranStar already had in place. It is not often that a center has the opportunity to test its maximum abilities and limits in real-time situations, but TranStar had such an occasion in 2001 with the tropical storm Allison experience.

One does not wish for events that had such a magnitude of destruction, affected so many people and costing so much not only in lives but in dollars. The severe weather damaged or destroyed over 24,159 homes; 23 people lost their lives; 2,100 hospital patients required evacuation; major transportation arteries were closed and emergency personnel received 4,030 calls within a 24-hour period for rescue and high water evacuations.

The estimated damage cost in Harris County alone was $4.9 billion. Even the Pulse Network located in Houston went down, affecting access of funds through automated teller machines across the nation. This event defined TranStar’s place as the community’s focal point for traffic management and emergency management by facing the challenges provided by this level of event.

While the emergency and traffic management operations were combined into one center, the in-house operations of each agency were still self-contained so the sharing of information between the two operations was by the normal methods of telephone, e-mail and physical interaction. The inefficiency of these types of communications became apparent in June 2001, when tropical storm Allison inundated the area with up to 26.5 in. of rain in a 24-hour period on already rain-soaked soil and swollen bayous and creeks.

It was realized that there had to be a better way to combine the needed information and communication into one system available to all responders. TxDOT’s Houston District, in coordination with the other partner agencies, used local funds combined with federal demonstration money ($650,000) from the Priority Corridor Program to develop a web-based incident management system that would gather, store and disseminate important incident data. The new system, now known as the Regional Incident Management System (RIMS), was developed to serve the six-county region under the Houston District responsibility.

The system gives each agency the ability to access its own forms and record data pertinent to its operation, yet it provides real-time access to the information to all of the participating agencies without compromising the integrity and security of each agency’s individual data.

It also allows for compiling all information for reporting purposes regardless of designated agency input. This software program resides on a server at Houston TranStar and is simply accessed through a web browser. The use of a web-based system has three major advantages: (1) no special software would need to be installed on an operator’s workstation; (2) the system could be accessed over the Internet allowing for remote operation; and (3) the maintenance of the system would be greatly simplified (only one source to upgrade ensuring that all participants are using the same version).

RIMS in

In developing the RIMS application, the Houston District’s Transportation Management Section (TMS) took the opportunity to enhance its collection of freeway incident data. TMS expanded coverage to include information gathering on the freeway frontage roads and to provide better location data. Other TxDOT stand-alone applications used in incident and emergency management were incorporated in the RIMS system for a one-stop shop for handling transportation management. The TMS uses the forms to monitor:

• Incidents;
• Maintenance deficiency calls;
• Heavy-duty wrecker dispatching;
• Motorist Assistance Program (MAP) dispatching; and
• Extended road closures.

This incident data also is transmitted to the Houston TranStar website (www.houstontranstar.org) for travel information dissemination to the general public. In 2003 this website received over 66 million hits to get traffic information on area roadways.

Before RIMS, the Harris County Office of Emergency Management (HCOEM) and the City of Houston Department of Emergency Management (COHDEM) used different tracking systems which did not allow direct communication between the two offices. This might have been a challenge to coordinate but was resolved when the two offices of emergency management agreed to one off-the-shelf tracking system that was incorporated into the system which now allows both agencies to track the following:

• OEM event;
• OEM incident;
• External resourses;
• Internal resources;
• Utility outages;
• Extended road closures;
• Damage assessment;
• Medical facilities;
• Public facilities;
• Shelters; and
• Chemical releases.

To ensure that RIMS would be robust enough to handle the demands of large scale regional emergency situations, TxDOT upgraded the TranStar database and placed the application on a cluster server for redundancy. All the various reports using information from this system can now be generated using a common off-the-shelf software package.

Even though all the agencies had been using RIMS for a year, the Super Bowl event provided the real test. Between Jan. 23 and Feb. 1, 2004, when the world’s eyes turned to the host city for the football championship, emergency management and security personnel at all levels came to Houston to prepare, manage and stand ready to act should something go wrong. HCOEM, COHDEM, the Texas Office of Emergency Management, METRO, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Coast Guard and local law enforcement agencies used RIMS to connect multiple staging locations throughout the region.

These agencies were able to communicate and coordinate the activities to transport, manage and protect the 1 million people that visited the downtown Houston Super Bowl events over the two-week period. In the after-event critique by the various agencies, RIMS was credited as one of the reasons that Super Bowl XXXVIII was a non-event for security and traffic issues. TME