 When Hurricane Sandy blew into Portland last week, the city activated its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the city's response to the storm. Acting Fire Chief Steven Smith talked about how the center works to keep Portland's residents safe. What goes on in this room during an emergency? This is the Portland Emergency Operations Center. This is the place where we coordinate our response to any emergency of significant storms. It would be fire, significant fire, or when we're coordinating activities with outside agencies or other communities. And who is in the room here? What departments are here? We currently have representatives of the police department, fire department, obviously. The dispatch center, we've got somebody from the manager's office. We have somebody from finance and we have somebody from public services. Is it executives, operational people, a mix of both? It's mostly the decision makers. Depending on the event, we'll have people that will go to different areas. We will do a response capability from here. We'll manage that. We'll also have the decision makers that coordinate the overall picture. The response people will turn that out to the people that are in the field. And then we'll get the information back here so we'll be able to track what's going on as the event changes and coordinate some sort of a response to things as they happen. What kind of decisions do they need to make here? Whether ships come into the harbor, does it close the airport, what sort of things do you decide here? It could be all of those things. We actually had somebody from the airport here a while ago. They have left, but there would be somebody from the airport there. We could actually have somebody from, or at least interacting with the coast guard if that became necessary. We could be making decisions on whether an evacuation was needed. There could be decisions on any type of, any of the response components that may be needed depending on the situation. What type of information comes into this room and where does it come from? We have all of our 911 calls that are called into our dispatch center. We track them here. We track our response here. We can actually see real time what's going on in the field. We know where they are, what they're doing. We also have the capability to track some of the non-emergency things that may affect our responses, such as trees that have come down that are not necessarily taken wires down or impacted traffic, but still might show us things that are happening in a specific area where we've had two or three trees come down, and now we're starting to have ones that come down that are impacting some of the emergency services. For example, if a tree comes down and you get a report about that, do you end up calling CMP about that, or is there another mechanism that they find out about it? They may have already called CMP or we certainly will call. That's part of the dispatch center's responsibilities is they'll notify whoever needs to be notified as things transpire. CMP may not be responding to the event immediately, and in that case we'll probably send equipment out there where they'll tape off an area and try to secure it and keep people away from it before they move on to the next event. We hear during the emergency operation for Hurricane Sandy, does the city have a weather service that it relies on? We usually use the National Weather Service in Greymane. It gives us probably the most up-to-date and accurate information, so we depend on them pretty well. Do you coordinate with outside agencies, for example the State Emergency Operations Center or FEMA or something like that? We do most of our coordination with Cumberland County Emergency Management and Main Emergency Management in Augusta. We'll have conference calls with both of those entities, try to coordinate what we're doing so that everybody knows what's going on and who's being impacted by the event as it changes. During an emergency like this, if a citizen sees a dangerous situation down parallel to downtree, a flooded road, what's the best way for them to get information to you? Just as any other time, the 9-1-1 system is by far your best route to get information to us with the capability to answer most of the calls quickly, and we'll get somebody moving on as soon as we can. When you have storms that are fairly significant like this, we may have some calls that start to back up a little bit, but like I said before, with the power lines down and things like that, we'll try to secure the area and then move on to the next call.