Tremendous strides have been made in public-safety communications in recent years, as evidenced by the creation of FirstNet—which has been tasked with building the nation’s first coast-to-coast broadband network for first responders—and the progress made in the development of the next-generation 911 architecture. Yet we still have many significant technology gaps, with the most significant being situational awareness and first-responder location information.

Earlier this year, a wildfire occurred in Arizona that claimed 19 first-responder lives, and the lack of adequate location information was cited as a contributing factor.  Such scenarios seem to be repeated continually across the country—and across the globe for that matter—and as such conjure an important question: when will life-saving location technology become the first and highest priority for the public-safety sector?

The fire service offers some excellent examples of changing requirements or policies in order to save firefighter lives, such as implementing enclosed cabs on fire trucks or imposing the “two in, two out” rule for structure-fire response. But there are very few, if any, accomplishments of this magnitude regarding communications. Yet, communications save lives and a lack of communications costs lives.  It is that simple. Where are the rules and requirements for communications and technology-based situational awareness?

The report is clear from the aforementioned Yarnell Hill Fire: inadequate communications technology played a crucial role in the last few minutes of the firefighter’s lives. It was the perfect storm: an air tanker circling overhead could not locate the doomed team due to the complex environment they were in; the fire conditions were changing rapidly; and the team on the ground was trying to communicate its position—a task complicated by heavy smoke, unfamiliar and irregular terrain, and the lack of adequate location information—as it maneuvered to avoid a fast-moving, fast-changing wildfire. The bottom line was that the air tanker had no chance to pinpoint the firefighters, or to support their egress. 

If this happens tomorrow the results predictably will be the same. 

Consequently, a national program needs to be created that standardizes critical geospatial data, metadata and security protocols, and which enables emerging technologies to deploy simple, nationally interoperable, real-time visual displays on our computers and smartphones.  The technology is not the challenge.  Just as in land-mobile radio (LMR), developing standards, establishing governance and aligning our business processes collectively are the challenge. 

Just as in LMR interoperability, there needs to be a global set of business rules, supported by technology, which allows ad-hoc sets of responders to form a real-time geospatial picture, in any event, including wildfires and other natural disasters, school and shopping mall shootings, terrorist attacks, and any other incident where mass casualties are a possibility.

We also must look beyond everyday response, by considering the national security implications of not having a proper information-sharing platform for enhancing situational awareness. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the implications of the December 2008 Mumbai incident, which consisted of a dozen well-coordinated shootings and bombings that occurred across India’s largest city.

To execute the attacks, terrorists used technology in the following ways: to gain communications superiority; to expand the damage path of their coordinated attack; and to leverage the communications confusion of first responders. This event should serve as a grave warning to all public-safety professionals in the U.S., as it demonstrated the high value of tools that provide enhanced situational awareness—unfortunately, the people benefitting from this superior technology in this instance were the terrorists, not first responders.

Our nation’s continued inability to develop a meaningful strategy to coordinate and improve emergency services geospatial communications is creating a blatant vulnerability and is the greatest single underlying threat to U.S. first responders and the communities they protect; to the critical-infrastructure community; to our national defense; and to our economy.