Urgent Communications – Commentary

A rash of “swatting” incidents occurred across the country in September. Swatting is the practice of falsely reporting an emergency to elicit a law-enforcement response, ideally one involving the SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team.  As an example, Cincinnati-area high school was placed on lockdown when a 911 call was made to report an active-shooter […]

Rogers Communications Canada experienced a national service outage on July 8, 2022, that halted LTE communications for millions of Canadians, including public-safety agencies counting on mobile broadband for operations. In light of this jarring failure, should public-safety leaders rethink plans to collapse all wireless communications onto a single wireless technology platform operated by a service […]

An adage regarding the stock market goes something like this: over any 20-year period, the market delivers a return on investment of about 10 percent, but every 20-year period—regardless of when it begins or when it ends—contains peaks and valleys that are driven by market conditions that change often, and often substantially. This adage just […]

The grief following a firefighter line-of-duty death (LODD) is beyond words. Fellow firefighters are devastated. Families are shattered. In the aftermath, questions arise about the circumstances: Was the loss preventable? What was the chain of actions leading to the catastrophe? Central to these questions is the role of incident command (IC), the command’s situational awareness, […]