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Chris Essid: Hello. My name is Chris Essid with the Department of Homeland Security’s
Office of Emergency Communications. I’m the Director of the Office of Emergency
Communications, and I’m here today with Fire Chief Charles Werner from Charlottesville, Virginia,
and Deputy Chief Eddie Reyes from the Alexandria Police Department and we’re going to be doing
a session on the importance of partnerships for interoperable emergency communications.
What are some of the biggest challenges, Charles, that the community is facing right now?
Chief Charles Werner: Well I think first there are two aspects:
One is operability—the ability to operate within its own territory,
and interoperability—to work with other agencies and larger scale incidents
or in larger geographic regions. And that really comes down to
how well do you work together, and it gets back to what you were talking about,
partnerships and relationships and interoperability between those agencies.
Deputy Chief Eddie Reyes: For me it’s getting the political buy-in.
We as public safety sometimes have not done a good enough job
explaining to elected officials why this issue is so incredibly important,
and I think sometimes we need to do a better job of just taking 30 minutes
at a city council session, giving them a layout of our communications issues,
giving them a layout of cost, because often times the cost is the thing that really
astounds elected officials. They have no idea that a radio system can potentially cost
as much as single to double digit in millions of dollars.
And that’s pretty astonishing to some elected officials, and the first time they’re hearing it
is when your system is 30 years old.
Chief Werner: Right. And just to add to that a little bit more,
I think the issue that we see is that it’s those partnerships and relationships
that formalize developing, and it’s not easy all the time.
So it’s not an easy process, but the results from those partnerships are astounding.
Essid: Well something you all taught me early on back in 2002
when I took that State Interoperability Coordinator job was that the problem was more
90 percent coordination/partnerships and then 10 percent technology.
So the technologies are there to solve the problem.
Would you all still agree with that after all this time?
Deputy Chief Reyes: Yeah. Before you’re starting to plan on talking to your neighbor
and planning for the next big event, make sure that within your confines
of your municipality you’re talking to each other first, because you can’t really talk to
your neighbor, if you’re not even talking to each other.
And I think what OEC and the National Emergency Communications Plan has done
with this is put that message out. Exactly like Chief Werner said:
Focus on communications first, focus on interoperability,
and then your third logical step will become interoperability.
Essid: My next question is, what partnerships have you seen
that have been influencing the public safety community and have been very effective?
Chief Werner: Well, let me work my way up. Let me talk first from
our regional situation. We have a regional communications center,
the City of Charlottesville, the county of Albemarle, the University of Virginia,
that all work together under one system, that is collaboration, which creates interoperability.
You go to the next step and you look at the State level, where we worked together
collectively to begin the Statewide Interoperability Executive Committee in Virginia
and developing the organizations within the State to come together with governance
and discuss planning for grant guidance. And then you go to the national level
and we look at SAFECOM, the Executive Committee, and then you have the
expanded Emergency Response Council that brings in a larger subset of that.
And then you have the national organizations and associations that we work with
to bring all this together, and then you look at the Federal level.
This really is beginning to figure out, how do we do the partnerships from the local level
to State level to the Federal level and create this national idea or concept.
So then you’ve got the ECPC that comes at the Federal level of uniting Federal agencies
to figure out, how do we activate all the things that we have in the most effective way possible,
and then you take all that and it comes into the National Emergency Communications Plan,
and the key with that is National Emergency Communications Plan
to create an understanding between our agencies.
Deputy Chief Reyes: I mean that’s right on target, and I’ll give you an example.
In January and February when the National Capitol Region had that large
snowstorm here, we had fire personnel supplementing our fire department
from as far away as southern Virginia. Governance, the training,
and the standards that had been in place a long time ago—thanks in good part
to a lot of the planning through the OEC and the National Emergency Communications Plan—
allowed us to plug these people into our regional weather emergency and we made out.
Essid: Everything we’ve accomplished at the State level, and now we're
working on the national level, has been so instrumental because of the
partnerships we’ve formed and our Office is very appreciative of your time
and the associations you represent in the SAFECOM effort to helping us
everything we do as far as developing statewide plans, COML criteria,
the National Emergency Communications Plan, you name it, and we look forward to,
you know, partnering with you all in the future to do great things in the future as well.
So we thank you for being here and sharing your time with us.