 Coming up next we've got a great show for you. We're going behind the scenes with the Public Safety Communications Office. You're going to learn the importance of communication in response to emergencies, the requirements and technical skills that it takes to keep that system together, and we'll be talking to the lead person of that organization, Karen Wong. So stick with us. Thank you for joining us. I'm Tina Walker and I'm here with Lori Newquist and we're with the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Today we're sitting in the heart of the State Operations Center, which is actually the hub of communications for the deployment of resources and personnel for response to any incident throughout California, be it wildfire flood, you get the picture. Today we're joined with Karen Wong with the Public Safety Communications Office that recently joined the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and we're so happy you're here with us today. Thank you. This is exciting. It is. It's fun and we'd like to have this time to talk to you a little bit about PSCO and how it's actually integrated into Cal OES and how it helps an emergency response throughout the state. So tell us a little bit about the organization. Okay, the organization, we have roughly 400 people that support and work for PSCO and as we have merged into Cal OES, some of those folks now sit at OES headquarters in procurement and HR and some of the other areas, but the majority of our staff are actually over off of Richards Boulevard and out in dispersed statewide and geographical areas strategically state placed for response if there's any radio issues as far as outages or just working with our client agencies to keep the radio systems up and running. We have three major programs. Our first program is, excuse me, 9-1-1 and we're responsible for the funding of the infrastructure and its local reimbursement and policies for the infrastructure for 9-1-1 and also getting the state to move forward with the next generation of 9-1-1 which is basically having our 9-1-1 system on an IP backbone. Having the system on an IP backbone, one of the areas for emergency response that is going to be extremely helpful is that with that PSAP is being tied together and the PSAP is a public safety answering point. It's a term we use all the time, but it's actually the public safety answering point and with having them tied together, we've lost some of the PSAPs, the earthquake up north in Fortuna. We lost the PSAP for a couple of days because we had the outage. With having PSAPs all tied together on an IP backbone, we'll have intelligent routing so if a PSAP goes down, it will intelligently route to the next closest PSAP so the 9-1-1 calls can always be answered and that's extremely important to the citizens. That's probably the biggest benefit of the next generation of 9-1-1. However, we'll also be able to accept text messaging. Anybody with a child or knows of a child somewhere between 9 and probably early 30s, everybody texts. And so there's an expectation by the citizens of California actually at the national level that we should be able to text 9-1-1. That will also be a benefit. The other benefit will be to be able to send still pictures and also video. So if there is something going on that, you know, the call taker or actually the first responder needs to see prior to responding, we'll be able to get the pictures over to them or the video. So it's really pretty exciting. So let's talk about 9-1-1. People wouldn't have known, well, and I certainly didn't until PSCO came over to Cal OES that you take care of that 9-1-1 infrastructure. What services or agencies in California do you serve or take care of? There are 458 public safety entrants in California and who they belong to are the sheriffs, the police chiefs, and fire and EMS. So they're distributed statewide and it doesn't necessarily go with county, it actually goes by population. So we will have several PSAPs in a highly populated area and then our more rural counties will have just one or two. So what's next for the future coming up? I mean, we're already, we're doing text, we're doing videos, we're doing photos already with this communication. What's next? What's coming up next in the future? Well, we're not quite there with the video, photo, and text. What we have right now is we have our legacy 9-1-1 system and that's our basically telephone system that we all trust and rely upon. Moving over to an IP backbone has been a challenge only because we cannot have 9-1-1 fail. So what we have done in California is we first developed our strategic plan for 9-1-1 to get all of our stakeholders together. We have a 9-1-1 advisory board who have the appointees by the governor's office who represent the sheriff's office, the police chiefs association, fire chiefs, as well as a couple of our largest stakeholder associations, APCO and CalNINA. So we have our board, we worked closely with our board, they reached out to their own stakeholders, we put our strategic plan together and the strategic plan really pointed us to go to the next generation of 9-1-1. Then we developed a roadmap on some of our questions and what we thought we needed to do to get there. And a lot of it was public outreach. So as that came up in early 2011, we held six public meetings and we actually solicited the local sheriffs, the local police chiefs, the local fire, as well as the public to get us feedback on what the expectations of 9-1-1 were. We learned a lot about 9-1-1 and one of the most significant things and everybody that knows me has to hear this is there are actually heart pumps now that are being put in people that need the heart pumps to stay alive that can call 9-1-1. Amazing. But there's nobody on the other end to take that call because we don't have that type of an infrastructure set up yet. So that's by next gen so important. We have five pilot projects. We have one at the northeastern part of California and we've actually tied 32 PSAPs in 13 counties together. We were also able to test first in the nation to test the ability to do a lat-long location-based routing of the caller over an IP network. And that had not been done. It was still kind of sketchy at times with our wireless 9-1-1 calls but we were able to pinpoint that and save minutes for the folks calling 9-1-1 to get response out there. So you kind of touched on saving minutes for those that are calling in and I notice on my cell phone bill there's kind of a surcharge. Tell us a little bit about that. What does that mean? What are we paying for? You're paying for this network for the state. Right now I think it's based at one half of 1% of your interstate calls. So all the calls that you make within California get this one half of 1% based for this account and it's called the state emergency telephone number account and it's really to fund the 9-1-1 statewide. And again we're one of the few states in the nation that have this ability to fund the statewide system. So all the equipment that's in the public safety answering points all of their accessories that they need whether it's a headset, the multitude of monitors, some of them have actually six monitors in front of their system in order to be able to take the calls and be able to identify the locations. And you touched on public outreach too. And part of that education program, tell us a little bit about 9-1-1 kids. 9-1-1 for kids is an incredible organization and they serve the schools. And what they do is they go out and we help them fund some of their educational resources as we do for other public safety answering points but their educational resources for kids and what they do is they keep track of the real heroes. The children that have called 9-1-1 for their parents and we have several award ceremonies for them throughout the year. There is also one, the largest award ceremony that we hold at the state capitol every year. So that's always fun to participate. We have a picture here. Is there a story you can share with us related to this little girl that's being recognized? The little girl being recognized actually saved her mom by calling 9-1-1. She was in a very tough situation and I don't remember the details specifically but she was in a very stressful situation and through leaving her house, going over to another neighbor's house, being able to articulate what happened, get on the phone, tell the police to come, she was actually able to save her mother. And then also, you'll see the dispatcher holding hers as well. She also, they have to talk a lot of the children through how to communicate and actually get the resources that they need where they need to be. So they really work together. It's phenomenal that some of these children can do in a very stressful environment. And so how did they learn to do this stuff? I mean, do you guys give them some tools, give them some information that helps them move forward in learning this process and being able to do that properly and quickly? The 9-1-1 for kids is an outreach for elementary schools. And so what we do is we, through the Sentinel Fund, the state emergency telephone number account, fund the tools that they need to get these out there so they'll be coloring books, there'll be other educational guides that they use to teach the children about 9-1-1. That's awesome. So we've talked about 9-1-1 and then there's another component to communication that is more service-based, I would think. Tell us a little bit about the radio communications aspect. Okay, the radio communications, we have, we design, engineer, install and maintain the radio communications for all the state's public safety agencies. CHP, Cal Fire, Fish and Game, Parks and Rec, OES, as well as some of the other small ones. We also do DOJ. We just got through installing some radio equipment for Department of Insurance because they do have investigators as well. So we support the radio systems. Radio systems tend to last forever, so we have to support not only 1980 technology but current technology as well. So our staff are very diverse in radio communications. They're pretty amazing. Companies will go out of business so they have to actually fabricate the parts that we need to keep our legacy radio systems going. We do a lot of that in-house. We have our special projects unit before any radio system is deployed or even any new handheld system that's used by any of our client agencies. They have to go through rigorous testing so we make sure that they can withstand the heat in the desert, the cold up in our higher elevations, the salt water that they are being exposed to daily. So they go through a pretty rigorous... See, these are things that we wouldn't even know. You know, as far as radio use, it's like we don't even consider that weather can impact it and so that's a critical component in this training and then continuing that system. What about installation? We have a picture here that shows a pretty impressive tower with guys working on the tower. Tell us a little bit about that and also we have a picture of a microwave installation and really for the general public and also for me. Tell us about the installation and what exactly is microwave? Microwave actually is one of those old technologies that I keep saying this is becoming new again. It is just a radio frequency that you have these very large dishes as you can see on the picture that actually captures the radio frequency. It can span quite a ways. Our towers can be 50 miles apart line of sight. Probably not quite as temperamental as a radio system with a antenna and it's our backbone that we have our microwave network that actually spans the state of California. So it is our backbone for our radio system. What's going on with our microwave system right now? It has been in place since roughly 1947. We actually have the book that was written and they did it in books back then to the Department of Finance to actually make this program an organization and it was actually under Department of Finance at the time before they moved it to general services but they have the same microwave maps that we use today because it's the same footprint. So we have an analog system and roughly 50% of our microwave is analog and now we did a strategic plan again with all of our client agencies very collaborative on how we are going to move forward with this microwave and digital system for them and the digital system will provide data if they need to send data over this network which we've never done before. So we're working on that and it's critical to many of the organizations that we serve and also for the few of us that have been around for a very long time it is the green phone system and it has always worked especially about the earthquakes we've had in California the green phones have always worked. So I want to kind of go back a little bit here and just kind of touch on something. You guys have a huge responsibility for the state of California in handling all communications and radio communications and whatnot. Why the state versus say Motorola? We have, gosh, I want to say I'm probably overstating this roughly 20 different systems. Every department needs something different for their own solutions. We also need to step back a radio strategic plan because what we want to do is start moving all the agencies to a system to system. But we have to understand that parks may have a different need based on obviously the California Highway Patrol that runs up and down the highways all the time. So what we want to do is find like agencies that we can maybe consolidate or merge their systems together. It's a 10-year plan because it will take so long to get there because again radio systems last for so long. So there's no one company that would give us the solution that we need. So we have several different solutions out there and then in addition a lot of the componentry that goes along would not be any one type of system. We also, we require open architecture and open source. So the proprietary source we just wouldn't be going forward with. Okay, so considering the huge system that PSCO maintains, tell us a little bit about that whole maintenance operation. Okay, the maintenance operation, there are folks that are statewide and they are on, we have folks that are on-call throughout the weeks. We have a different on-call type of a program but they're expected to respond to any outage within two hours. And it's not your typical health test so they can call in to our network operation center, the NOC, anybody has an outage. And what they'll do is we actually have folks rolling within two hours. So we don't take the trouble to take a week for two hours to call. We actually have folks rolling because the radio system cannot be out. So I believe you have a picture of a snow cap. We do. And so radio systems go down and what we do, we actually have nine snow cats strategically placed throughout California where we get a lot of snow. This one particular picture shows what they had to do to actually get to the vault. We have several other pictures where the snow cat is up on top of the vault and they're actually opening the trapdoor on the top of the vault to get down into the vault to do the radio work. Very much trained in inclement weather. They have the training on how to of course use the snow cat. And then also cold weather survival skills. And then we also have a picture of a four by four driving through some terrain. Another example of the different pieces of California your folks need to travel through to respond. Most of our mountain tops are not easily accessible. So it's required that we have four-wheel drive trucks that they can get to the mountain tops and in order to do that they need training to make sure they do. I've gone to a few of the mountain tops. They always take me to the nice easy ones and they're still, you need a four-wheel drive. So when they have to respond we need to make sure that they're trained to be able to respond. The towers, and we kind of jumped over this and I want to go back. The towers, you saw the installation. We do tower training. Everybody must be certified in tower training and it's not so much just being able to climb but we need the first aid part of it. So if one of our staff either has a medical condition or is hurt while they're up there installing they have to go through training on how to get that person safely off the tower because by the time 911 could respond we can't have somebody just sitting up there. And when 911 responds they wouldn't be trained to go up the tower and remove the person anyway. So they go through rigorous training CPR first aid as well. And you touched on the next subject that I kind of want to segue into is training. I'm curious to know and I'm sure everybody else would be too is what kind of training do they go through? There's various different things that they do out in the field. We've touched on working on these four by fours and going up high terrain climbing towers responding to fire incidents and whatnot. Tell us a little bit more about what the requirements are for their certification and what kind of programs they go through. And another question to you kind of going into that as well is do they are they required to go out as partners or do they go out individually? Depends on where they're going out so I'll go back to that in just a second whether they partner up or they go out individually. The training process takes about two years. What we're finding is resources that have the skills that we need and also have the FCC license to work on FCC frequencies are hard to come by. So we have a very difficult retention issue because we get our staff trained and they're usually you know, somebody else recruits them for their own and with state the salaries are usually different but it takes about two years for our technicians to actually be trained once they come into our system. So what we're doing now is we're working closely with the military they have a TAP program that as the military is bringing home the troops they have a transition program we go there, we let them know what we're doing that we need folks so we're recruiting through the military. We're also working with American River College we have a couple of tours every time they start a semester we're working with a professor to start putting some of our curriculum in their training radio frequency is not something that's normally at the colleges we want to do the fun stuff they just don't realize how much fun this could be as well. So we're doing an outreach but the hands-on training is basically what we have to provide so we have to train on the older legacy radio systems as well as the new system. So we have a whole training program with all the pieces of equipment that they need to be trained on so we'll have hands-on training within our own facility but then they also do on the job training with a senior technician and I think we have some slides here too that we want to show you tell us a little bit about those. The incident based we have an incident based team which this is a training for that they actually go through training with Cal Fire on how to survive in a fire because what happens is when there's a large fire a lot of the times they need our radio techs our radio techs get deployed out to the incident base and they actually will report to the communications commander there and they will spend their days making sure the radios are programmed so everybody can communicate but if the fire expands out past our communication capabilities they're helicoptered over to the perimeter of the fire where they'll set up a temporary repeater so we will continue the communication so they work hand-in-hand with the incident base command and without them out there making sure that the radios can be interoperable and that they have communication systems throughout that fire the firefighters would not be able to communicate and it would be extremely dangerous for them so they are extremely important at many of these fires. How long does it take to stand up a mobile communication when they're responding out okay it's always stood up by Cal Fire by the time yeah it's stood up by Cal Fire they call our technicians to then become Cal Fires and so they put them in the communication command and that's where they work they'll see them until the fire is done and they're released so they don't actually have to set that up what they would have to set up would be the temporary repeaters if they needed to expand their communication system and I think we had another slide that was kind of talking about training too now what exactly are they doing in this one they are actually setting up a repeater, a temporary repeater out on one of the mountaintops in the fire and you can kind of see the smoke behind them we have several pictures that actually see flames behind them so sometimes we can't go too far out from the fire's perimeter or else the communication system won't work so they have to be pretty adjustable on where they're going to put the repeater and then also have to be very aware of their circumstances which is why they go through the incident-based training with Cal Fire now we also respond to civil unrest if there's a civil unrest and there's been a couple in San Francisco for the last couple of years where they've been asked to be on standby in case they had to program radios for the interoperability piece that's so fascinating that you are actually emergency responders not only in maintaining equipment but also responding to incidents and then being responsible for co-workers while you're on set now we only have a couple of minutes left Karen and before we release you to go off to your more important day than chatting with me and Lori it all matters it all matters communications is the basis for all emergency response whether it's CHP on the road and it's a traffic citation whether it's fighting a fire whether it's a citizen calling in with an emergency and then making sure the 911 system works and getting out there it all matters without communication everything breaks down it just breaks down CHP could not operate their vehicles and go out and do what they do every day without a communication system that works all the time what we base our communication systems on in the IT world they talk about it's up like 5.9 which is 9.999 ours is engineered at 6.9 and it has to be maintained at 6.9 because first responders cannot do their jobs without a radio system that stays up and the citizens cannot get a hold of their emergency response without the ability to call 911 so every day everything that we do matters and I've never worked with a more dedicated staff than I have with the Public Safety Communication staff they come in every day with the dedication to provide these services so Karen tell me Pill S what are you passionate about in this program I mean it's fantastic everything that you guys are doing is just amazing it's the job itself and I think it goes back to public service we are a public service organization and this is like the prime location to be providing the public service if I'm in a 911 meeting that will be my passion if I'm at a radio this is just something that's so important it's hard to say that one is more important than the other it just happens to be it's just a matter of time so I make really passionate about all the areas and the staff that are in those different areas are also just as passionate about the job can you share with us in your experience a success story like is there a benchmark event that happened with PSCO that you go back to to share the success of the organization or something that inspired you personally oh there's been a lot it's been the client agency support throughout this they what we did when I first came we had a consultant company come in and do a 360 of our organization and they looked and we have communication problems and there's issues with our billions and there's a lot of different issues however everyone said that they were very satisfied with the work and they would not go anywhere else to have our service done so every time we meet with the client agency while we always have issues to work through the passion that we're working for toward the common goal is always there so it's situations like that that I get excited when staff are getting excited themselves about the next generation 911 and where we're going and getting this text to 911 pilot out which will be out it's getting excited with the prospect of radio over IP which we have one system set up in the state it's moving forward it's hard to say one item and it's truly I love this job I always say this is like the best job in the state it's just fun so I mean it's an incredible program and I know the public would love to know is there anything they can do to help PSCO the public can by giving us feedback we have citizens call because we want 911 to work for them and it's pretty amazing there were gosh about five years ago where the backlog of wireless telephones be an answer for 911 and we now have a system in place that the calls we've gone from 40% to 2% because we had a routing on empirical data project so we were able to get those calls to the right PSAP and the calls from the public because the expectation has been risen that the calls are going to be answered when they're not answered and they give us all the information so we can go back and pinpoint that that may have been an accident on a freeway in Los Angeles or San Francisco which is usually the case and then what they do is they let us know they couldn't get through so that tells us as strengthens our need to get to next gen and to give us feedback about what it is but the feedback from the public would be extremely important Thank you so much Karen for joining us today I've learned a lot and I'm sure our viewers have gotten a lot more information about PSCO and it's been very helpful thank you very much and thank you for joining us and remember if you need any additional information about the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the Public Safety Communications Office you can visit us on the web at www.said.gov