Community Communications in Operation ShadowBowl

“ The Infrastructure Of Common Sense”

A Community Communications Infrastructure initiative:

An operational approach to achieve sustainable readiness for homeland security and community well being through overwhelming communications.

21st century America is a communications culture driven by the increasingly ubiquitous access to internet, phones, satellite, digital and analog television and radio broadcasts.

In every almost every community across America there is a system of “already in place” communications resources configured to support a variety of community needs and activities. These systems vary widely in their inherent capacity and overall utility.

There are emerging efforts to begin optimizing these indigenous community communication resources into an operationalized communication system for community based civil support of public safety, environmental monitoring and disaster response in times of need.

These Community Communications Infrastructure initiatives are focused on

interlinking their communities with the national level communications initiatives such as the interstate communications expressway in ways designed to address the immediate needs of the community and to create a bridge between the various governmental systems

As the nation develops new communication tools to support the first responders and their support agencies it is important to be able to leverage off available community communications systems and to promote the ability of involved citizens to communicate across the current barriers.

Every effort should be made to create a community communications system that enables the community citizens to communicate with first responders and their supporting agencies with the communications tools used everyday by normal citizens within that community.

Designed and developed for the worst case scenario but implemented in ways that support every day needs, such a communications system will facilitate a cooperative arrangement of organizations responding to the emerging needs of the community.

Leading by example

OPERATION SHADOWBOWL

In the modern world of heightened threat awareness Communities now find it more and more necessary to monitor their festivities, provide for the public safety and, if needed, respond to a catastrophic emergency.

To fully provide comprehensive security and safety many communities are now confronted with the need to integrate a diverse group of entities (individuals, groups, agencies and organizations) that do not routinely work together in day-to-day operations.

Such was the case at the 2003 SuperBowl in San Diego

Concerns about public safety during the Super Bowl XXXVII, heightened by public awareness of a possible terrorist attack, prompted the willingness of the San Diego Police Department to forge new partnerships with organizations typically not called upon by law enforcement.. The business community, the academic community, other local and regional government branches, representative non-profit organizations and proactive citizens were all integrated into the effort.

The concern about an attack was real. Qualcomm Stadium is only four air-minute miles from a porous International Border with Mexico and Tijuana’s International Airport. On one corner of the166-acre Stadium site sits a tank farm containing millions of gallons of gasoline. Two miles to the East, 1.5 billion gallons of water splashes in the City drinking water reservoirs. A dam failure natural or otherwise would bring a wall of water twenty feet high through the site in just 14 minutes. All of it flowing toward a river along the southern edge of the 70,000-seat facility and into one of San Diego major retail areas.

Fortunately, cooperation and mutual aid among the city's, county's and surrounding jurisdictions' first responders have been good in the past.

Throughout the San Diego community there was an acutely perceived need and a consensual willingness to do something far and well beyond the normal (traditional ) public safety and civil security measures.

To that end, the proactive citizens of San Diego in collaboration with the San Diego Police Department formed new alliances with the local educational community and businesses in order to begin to address these challenges.

San Diego State University took the lead and organized a community readiness and medical response drill called the operation ShadowBowl http://shadowbowl.sdsu.edu/ involving scores of technology, higher education and healthcare organizations public/private technology security partnerships ranging from videoconferencing, digital imagery, backup communications and Web-based incident command systems.

Shadow Bowl was built on the March 2002 Defense Department Domestic Emergency Response Information Services (DERIS) program, http://www.niusr.org/XiiProject.htm in which San Diego participated along with three other cities in a mock terrorist exercise. Unfortunately that effort has "languished" following the successful exercise due to lack of focus and funding.

Once ShadowBowl was initiated local support for communications resources was secured from the business community, colleges, other local and regional government branches, representative non-profit organizations and proactive citizens.

Utilizing available community based communications systems the shadowbowl exercise was designed and conducted to develop and test the capacity for a connecting the ever emerging, virtual arrangement of agencies and organizations to the citizen support systems

Operation ShadowBowl facilitated a cooperative arrangement of organizations from across the country and from multiple disciplines, all with a common axis and unified intent for supporting the safety and security needs of the San Diego community during Super Bowl XXXVII.

An initial focus of Shadow Bowl was to demonstrate a community readiness model and medical response to a mass casualty event utilizing the available community communications infrastructure

Specifically Shadowbowl provided a technical infrastructure and conceptual framework for exploring and developing new mass casualty response methods using biomedical devices , informatic technologies, and communication systems that enhance the ability to collaborate and effectively respond to emerging needs during natural or man made disasters.

Analysis of information requires shared, real time situation awareness on behalf of multi-disciplined subject matter experts, scattered across local, state and federal agencies.

A fully functioning Community Operations Center was designed , implemented and operated as a second tier command center that personnel from official agencies would fill-in on if the need had emerged . This community ops center was used for gathering, integrating, displaying and monitoring community deployed field sensor readings—fire, acoustic, chemical, radiological, biological, physiological sensors—video surveillance, population densities, medical reachback encounters, and to prototype a Virtual Emergency Operations Center as a resource made available to various civil authorities and security partners

It is a requirement that experts must be able to provide time-sensitive input to key responder decision makers who are monitoring developing events. Thus, while planning mitigating interventions it is important to establish an informal partnership with a coalition of organizations from academia, industry, citizen groups, and the federal government to facilitate effective communication.

In addition to the community ops center a forward operations center provided an onsite communications hub, tying the multiple RF, wireless data, laser-optic and satellite circuits into a significantly robust and redundant infrastructure node for critical incident support. Various sensor systems as well as the voice, video, mobile, and medical data networks entered the forward operations center and were multiplexed into the network and feed back through the community operations center.

As part of the Shadow Bowl Exercise, biological, chemical and radiological acoustic and air-quality sensors, along with water quality - monitoring devices, were placed around the area as an early warning system. Constant weather data was fed into plume modeling software to determine the direction of a potential toxic cloud and its affect on different parts of the city. All of this was designed to detect, prevent, respond, assess and support the first responders to the public’s safety needs.

Connectivity was the most critical path resource, considering most of the critical technology used required some form of continuous network communication.

Outcomes

ShadowBowl successfully demonstrated the utility of using community based communications for Environmental monitoring, sensor integration, communications for civil support of public safety and Security.

Shadowbowl allowed others to bring in technological infrastructure far beyond what any local Police Department would have been capable of doing itself. Especially in the current economic environment

Although the Shadow Bowl Exercise was portrayed as a community readiness drill , This event driven exercise has enabled the Interdisciplinary Committee for Community Response to Catastrophic Events to begin to develop the blueprint for other communities to follow.

This model of enhancing community safety by utilizing the community communications infrastructure as a means to provide multiple layers of information in multiple languages through multiple means of dissemination and collection is part of the overall vision, that community communications infrastructure is vitally important for country, community, and citizen

Part of the exercise goals was to provide feedback on "what works, what doesn't work, what breaks, what can be fixed on the fly and how can we make this all work," so during a real emergency, first responders could quickly react and limit casualties.

Beside the public safety aspects, another objective of ShadowBowl was to demonstrate to the federal government that San Diego has what it takes to be a leader in developing community supported public safety modeling in today’s world in the sense that we have an infrastructure in place already among government agencies, educational institutions, private organizations and community businesses, and we have synergy here and can bring things together quickly.

We will continue to pursue activities that lead to enhanced public safety using an advanced communication network and environmental sensor grid,

Through our actions we intend to build a sustainable collaboration model between local state ,federal, civilian, military, public, and private partners. For ongoing training and resource sharing within the community and throughout the nation

Professional relationships

It is important to develop and foster professional relationships between these various partners in the early stages so that as new systems are developed the linkage of the communications systems is designed as a primary function,

Personal interactions

Ultimately it will require that the people in charge have developed some friends within the community for all this to work

Community communications infrastructure with redundant multi modal networks are key to survival

Shadowbowl clearly demonstrated community readiness to partner with government and participate in support of providing a secure, safe event on 26 January. And beyond

Recommendation 1 – Initiate Action

Develop a communications rich testbed, establish a context of operations, initiate a community of interest ,instigate initial activities and iterate progressively through continually refined activities, while seeking to develop and refine applications that are useful and valuable to the community in everything in between everyday life and disasters

Recommendation – 2 – Support Physical Infrastructure

Provide for an auxiliary communications resource for community based civil support of environmental monitoring, public safety, disaster response

The first order of business is to insure that the Physical infrastructure be sustainably operational and continuously available

Recommendation –3- Develop A Model

Develop a community based communication system template that can be implemented nationally at the community level , and be optimized for each community

Recommendation –4- Invest In Success

Support ongoing projects enhancing community readiness through innovative applications of community based communications resources including services, technologies and professional expertise

Academic, commercial and private networks within the community can be effectively tapped to provide a wider range of communications support options,, when Provided with a compelling reason to participate

Recommendation –5- Sustain Involvement

Evolve the applications to sustain a high level of readiness while providing a service that enhances the day to day quality of life and general well being of the community

Recommendation –6- Develop Countermeasures To Ignorance, Illness, and Institutional Inertia

Facilitate community based readiness activities in support of public safety, environmental monitoring, civil communications, and other critical capabilities.

We must promote the evolution of a communications environment that enhances general

Health and wellness of being

We should deploy an operational sensor net for effective and useful

Environmental monitoring

We can create valuable and relevant

Educational experiences

We may institute community enriching, environment preserving, personally fulfilling

Recreational activities