Coordinated Emergency Response
Video walls powered by Hiperwall enabled Santa Ana PD to share visibility of common areas and high-profile critical infrastructure locations such as transit, energy, and public utility networks during an emergency.
Case Study
Background
The Santa Ana Emergency Operations Center is part of the Santa Ana Police Department’s Homeland Security Division, but works with Orange County Fire Authority, Orange County’s Emergency Management Division, Santa Ana Unified School District, the American Red Cross, and other departments and agencies in surrounding cities to provide the highest level of preparedness and coordination when disaster strikes. Keeping Santa Ana safe requires shared visibility of common areas and high-profile critical infrastructure locations such as transit, energy and public utilities network.
Challenge
The region’s biggest rainstorm in seven years slammed Orange County in January of this year, flooding roads, triggering mudslides, submerging vehicles and causing dozens of traffic accidents. The series of torrential downpours prompted the Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) to activate its Emergency Operations Center. It was clear that keeping Santa Ana safe required shared visibility of common areas and high-profile critical infrastructure locations such as transit, energy and public utilities.
Solution
Knowing they needed a level of preparedness for potential disasters, the SAPD began reviewing LED video wall solutions for a command center. The SAPD ultimately chose Hiperwall because it was designed specifically for large display surfaces – it was a true visualization system. But more importantly, it gave the SAPD the centralized capability for the display of multiple sources of information at once, including numerous video feeds, social media activity, news feeds, multiple HD-videos, maps and any standard or customized applications that can be displayed on a regular PC, among other sources.
Results
The Hiperwall visualization solution allows the SAPD Emergency Operations Center to receive any number of feeds from the 300-plus city-wide cameras, display the SAPD CAD system, National Weather Service satellite imagery, several social media channels, helicopter downlink video, SAPD video cameras, local news and much more.
In addition, their visualization system includes video content analytics to detect policy driven situations such as motion in restricted areas, loitering, overcrowding in public places, and more. Hiperwall seamlessly integrates access control and physical security systems allowing alarms and programmed events to be jointly managed.
During the winter storm, the SAPD Emergency Operations Center powered by Hiperwall became the command and control room for the city’s agencies to monitor the city-wide cameras, satellite weather changes in real-time, city maps from Google Earth to view flood damage, traffic accidents, 911 calls, fire/EMS, and public works. All three city departments were in the Emergency Operations Center using the Hiperwall visualization system to collaborate which allowed them to be more efficient in resource management, triage calls and managing response times during the storm.
Having a single location to gather and share information with those in the field and make risk mitigating decisions keeps the Santa Ana community safe. The incident will always dictate the necessary feeds and data requirements, but the SAPD is now prepared with their Hiperwall-driven Emergency Operations Center to manage or co-manage any situation.
