Five years ago, Hurricane Sandy made landfall along the Eastern Seaboard with winds up to 80 mph. A full moon made high tides 20 percent higher than normal and amplified Sandy’s surge. Stony Brook University experienced power outages, a complete network failure, and widespread communications failures. The winds caused a tree to fall on a building which caused a structure collapse and required a full evacuation of a residence hall. There was a gun point robbery during the storm, and a student death that occurred off campus. Stony Brook University realized they were not as prepared to efficiently manage emergency situations as they would like, so they began the search for a solution that would mitigate risks and facilitate quicker decision making in the future.
 
Lawrence Zacarese, Assistant Chief of Police and Director of the Office of Emergency Management, wanted a platform to help aggregate various streams of information to be viewed at once in case of another emergency. They needed to consolidate the security infrastructure into an intuitive, responsive control room capable of alerting students, administrators, faculty and first responders in real-time. The platform needed to gather data feeds and bring all the disparate systems together to interact with one another and be displayed on a single LED video wall in the event of an emergency. Displaying all evolving information in a centralized location is crucial to effective decision making.
 
After Hurricane Sandy, Stony Brook University spared no expense in building an emergency management control room. The challenge at Stony Brook was all existing technologies, cameras, card access readers, fire alarms, burglar alarms needed to work together, but were living in their own independent silos. Bringing these groups together was key to mitigating another disaster situation.
 
Ston ey Brook turned to Hiperwall software. A visualization system from Hiperwall is software-based and hardware-agnostic and can utilize the existing technologies in emergency services, security, and utility groups. The Hiperwall system can take any video source – from any camera – and push it to any location Stony Brook wants. This could be in the situation room, to someone’s phone, computer, or a remote location. The Hiperwall solution has given Stony Brook the ability to have a very streamlined and easy to use console where analysts can take content from any of the computers in the control room and manipulate it on multiple screens in a very straight-forward, user friendly process. In addition to ease of use, another key advantage of the Hiperwall solution is its adaptability:  Since it is a 100% software-based solution, Stony Brook can upgrade or expand the emergency operations room with any technology advances without compromising the system.
 
The Stony Brook Emergency Operations Center is equipped with LG and NEC displays. In the center is a 3x2 video wall comprised of 55-inch NEC no-bezel displays, surrounded by eight LG commercial-style TVs that provide extra data, social media and television streams. The operations room is the central campus monitoring solution managing 124 buildings, more than 1,000 cameras and the Stony Brook University Hospital and Medical Center on 1,039 acres in Long Island.
 
Stony Brook may not be able to predict the next weather catastrophe or emergency situation, but it will be ready to activate the emergency operations center at a moment’s notice. Since completing the installation in 2015, Stony Brook has activated the emergency operations room for several situations including fires in campus buildings and potential threats for active shooter situations.

 

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 to activate its Emergency Operations Center. The Emergency Operations Center is part of the SAPD’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.
 
The SAPD Emergency Operations Center morphed from two main workstations in separate offices displaying surveillance system cameras on four large screens primarily designed to monitor the perimeter of the Police Administration Building to a Hiperwall-driven command center with nine 55-inch NEC, thin bezel, commercial-grade displays. The SAPD did not have a “true” video wall or visualization system in place prior to installing a Hiperwall-driven system which includes IP cameras, an enterprise-class network management system and a new fiber-optic backbone. 
 
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 displaying infinite data sources that could be viewed and managed effectively and easily. The Hiperwall visualization solution allows the 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 video wall 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.
 
After discovering Hiperwall with all its capabilities, the SAPD stopped evaluating other video wall systems. Not only was Hiperwall an advanced visualization solution, it provided the SAPD the latest in technology and best practices for their Emergency Operations Center. It gave them a cost-effective solution that will grow with them. The Hiperwall software-centric solution requires only ordinary PCs, monitors, and a standard Ethernet network making Hiperwall a more affordable visualization system than traditional video wall technology. It’s ease of operation also expedited the training process, which effectively reduced manpower and operational costs.  
 
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.