Tech
notes
The
shocking terrorist attacks on London one year ago wreaked
widespread havoc, stretching the capital's emergency
response service to the limit.
Just
six months earlier, severe floods in the North-East cut
off around 10,000 homes in Hexham. Some residents
were evacuated, while others had to sit it out with no
running water or electricity.
Regardless
of the differences in scale and causes of these incidents,
the lessons remained the same. Such events can
expose major vulnerabilities in the level of our emergency
preparedness for emergencies and often demonstrate how
problematic it is to manage and share information across a
wide network of agencies and primary responders - police,
fire, emergency medical service, utilities, building
safety professionals etc.
Nevertheless,
such incidents make us challenge existing policies and how
they should be managed in our ever-changing society.
It's no surprise then that technology is playing a major
part in bringing together the plethora of existing
services and systems.
To
overcome the challenges and break down the barriers of
multi-agency communications, technology is now available
to enable users to create, utilise, share and distribute
emergency plans in pressurised and challenging environments.
If
information is available to be shared, police, fire and
other emergency teams can react in the most effective way
possible, giving them the best chance of controlling the
situation and minimising risk.
Any
situation could be planned for and any number of agencies
could manage incidents ranging from crowd control at a
football match to incident management on a major roadway;
from strategic supervision of a town centre march to
evacuation of a flooded village.
To
this end, the North-East is playing a leading role - our
highly sophisticated and rapidly growing digital
technology sector is at the forefront of developing
leading edge solutions to meet these key challenges.
At
Imass for instance, we've been working with emergency
planners to develop a state of the art tool which supports
the above remit and is tailor-made to support the UK's
emergency teams when disaster strikes. Our Strategic
Emergency Planning Solution (STEPS) is now being evaluated
by UK police forces, fire services and councils.
Advances
in digital technology (many of which are developed in the
North-East) mean our system can constantly evolve -
enabling us to add extra capabilities such as live CCTV
feeds, automatic vehicle and people location system, an
address look-up facility and points-of-interest searches.
I
think it's important that we in the North-East's
technology sector keep improving our services and products
and strive to remain at the cutting edge and, eventually
grow to become one of the biggest and most influential in
the UK.
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