Introduction to PACE Planning for the Emergency Communications Ecosystem

good day everyone uh my name is Bob Connors and I want to welcome you and say good morning or good afternoon depending on what time zone you're in uh to SIZA's introduction to the PACE planning for the emergency communication systems uh uh webinar this afternoon this is this afternoon my time um just to go over a few ground rules before we get into the content uh if if you haven't done so already please place yourself on mute believe all the um attendees are muted uh universally but just in case uh please make sure you're on mute uh how we're going to do the u the webinar is I'm going to go through the presentations and uh as you have questions please do not hesitate to uh drop your questions in the chat i have a couple members of my team here at SIZA who will be monitoring the chat and if it's a question that they can ask um you know during the presentation they will reply directly to you uh otherwise we'll try to summarize the questions at the end of the webinar uh if if people were talking about uh the same general content that they they want some additional uh feedback on uh during this presentation I may be referencing to referencing um you know certain uh entities whether it be public or private or different resources uh they're pure this is purely for educational purposes and I am not going to be um asking anyone to share any sensitive information about the themselves or their agencies um whenever possible so uh little uh introduction uh to everybody again my name is Bob Connors and I'm one of the functional managers here within the emergency communications division of SIZA i came to SISA a few years ago after retiring for um from for from a 26 career in law enforcement uh where I worked in a variety of roles starting off as a patrol officer moving up to um investigations i worked the bulk of my time in a multi-jurisdictional drug task force and also had some responsibilities uh with school safety overseeing our school resource uh officer program in the county that I worked um also I have um some almost 30 years of uh experience in the military both on active duty and in the army reserves also uh monitoring uh the chat and you may hear from him at the very end is my uh friend and colleague and supervisor Ken Carpenter who uh ca also came over from a military background and has worked uh for SIZA for a number of years and some other um and other federal roles dealing with emergency communications so that's a little bit about our background and our uh experience that we're hoping to share with you today the objectives of this webinar is to provide a general understanding of primary alternate contingency and emergency communications planning efforts uh we want to explain what that is exactly uh explain some of the initiation triggers on how you move and from these different levels and some considerations for uh all of you to uh take home with you today uh we want you to know what to do when your primary communication fails system fails and that's really what PACE is all about it's it's a a uh level a level of uh redundancy within communications and uh this this will cover additional uh areas of emphasis besides emergency communications as well and we want to help you uh provide you with some general tools to help uh develop and practice your own pace plan uh you know through this webinar series and and and reinforce the idea of how to cooperate with um other agencies that uh you may be near uh working with or um other critical infrastructure sectors that you may be aligned with in your uh various areas of uh responsibility something to um something to keep in mind when we're going through this webinar uh many of the examples I will use in the pres presentation are centered around emergency services because that's my personal uh background and my experience level but these concepts apply to all types of organizations uh each industry within the critical infrastructure community has specific communications requirements uh for example emergency services is a lot different than somebody that's coming in and trying to develop a pace plan in transportation for example communications in is is time-sensitive and mission critical often involving life and death uh situations and emergency management uh you know scenarios and uh for the most part two-way radios are primary means that uh emergency service personnel your fire your police your EMS workers for example that's that's their primary uh means of communication and what a pace plan should should work work around um on transportation for example is a is a contrast to that communications focus on logistics such as tracking shipments uh dispatching vehicles updating uh delivery schedules where companies leverage uh systems such as GPS tracking transportation management systems and alerting for uh streamlining the communication during that that uh flow and and delivery so what I'm asking everybody to keep in the back of their mind while we're going through this presentation is uh try to answer these two questions for yourself who do you in your organizations need to communicate with and what type of missionritical information do you need to send and receive from people within your organization and then outside of your organization so resilience is bigger than just pace you can't have resilience without planning and preparation so resilience is the capacity to adapt to changing conditions and prepare withstand and rapidly recover from disruptions so what we're hoping to do today through these uh educational webinars is turning the unprepared into a prepared state for all of you and despite the fact that we're introducing a new acronym it is an important one so again PACE PAC's underlying purpose is to support communications despite system failures this concept is becoming more and more important for continuity of operations as we put significant uh reliance on our ability to communicate um it's not part of it's not a replacement of coupe but it it's rather a a element of coupe that I want you to keep in mind um so what exactly is PACE pace is a methodology which was developed uh through the military to help resilient communications for units that needed to re to maintain communication and command and control activities uh regardless of the situations they're in and as you can imagine military you're operating in a v variety of you know often austere environments so the um uh the acronym stands for primary alternate contingency and emergency uh while we're looking at PACE from a communications perspective it can be used for a lot of different activities for example in for example in a uh in a medical emergency uh you know your primary uh depending on the the layout of of the area that you're in your primary means of evacuating somebody during an emergency uh situation would be a via helicopter uh otherwise you might have to drive to a a nearby landing strip for for a fixed wing aircraft to land and and evacuate somebody uh in other situations C as your contingency you may just have to drive and and convoy that person out and in other situations you may have to evacuate that person uh via some type of all-terrain vehicle because the roads are are passable or there are no roads for example so taking an evacuation example that's that's uh generally some of the uh the elements that you need to to consider who to involve in pace planning so a plan must take account take into account perspectives from all different uh stakeholders um the plan can be cannot be developed in a vacuum it usually takes the input of numerous practitioners to develop a successful plan so what does that mean um technical people tend to worry about technical problems where operational pe uh you know personnel in your organizations look at the day-to-day operations what needs to be accomplished what needs to be moved and oftentimes there's a disconnect between uh what the the technical uh elements are of a specific communications platform and the operational um arm of of your organization may feel that they can they can accomplish uh some of the things that we're going to talk about today through a specific technology where in reality they really can't and at the other times technology your technology group may may believe that um or may have an element that is not known to your operational arms so really getting those two uh uh uh organizational uh arms within within your groups or your companies or your agencies together is is really a a valuable part of of this process so PACE plans can often involve multiple agencies with certain interconnectivities sometimes agencies depend on a neighboring agency for example to share a system you don't have to have an understanding of what agency will be doing um or you you will need to have an an understanding of what agency will be doing during a failure example smaller agents may smaller agencies may not have the resources that a large larger agency may so it's good to to know not just what your uh personal plan is for excuse me for your organization for the agency that you work in uh but also what your neighboring or overlapping uh neighbors will do uh or could do for you in that in that situation and how to reach them so PACE as I mentioned before is not coupe uh continuity of operations planning is the effort within agencies so to ensure that they can operate and perform their mission when uh things go wrong so you know for example if you uh are a a standalone organization standalone manufacturing company for example and you need to relocate u part of your your operations due to some type of an emergency to an alternate site while that involves moving people and moving equipment and moving uh resources all that all of that involves uh being able to communicate with all the key elements of your organization so PACE is a component of coupe but it's not coupe and a lot of a lot of times we get the question where uh people believe that this is a replacement for coupe it's not it's only an element or it's only uh one chapter in your coupe plan that uh you should focus on so PACE in a little bit more detail um each level of PACE uh has is not just a designation but what we really want to drive home through this webinar is understanding uh the type of technologies that you need to consider when when uh drafting and and reviewing your PACE plan so for example your primary uh method of communication as I mentioned is in emergency services talking about my background is my my two-way radio um an alternate for some reason if my my police channel that I used for for all for a number of years would not work that's uh something was wrong with one of our towers or something was wrong with one of our our platforms i would simply switch to an alternate uh frequency maybe it's a fire department frequency maybe it's one of the interoperable uh frequencies um that we have within the state it's not my home channel it's not the one that I operate day in day out but I'm using the same technology just with a a different uh different twist uh so again that's the the backup method or the workaround but you're basically using the same um the same tool a fallback method or contingency typically relies on on um a a a completely different technology to begin with uh so for example if my radio doesn't work my other channels don't work I may have to use my cell phone for example to call my dispatch center say "Hey what's going on with the radio is are you am I the only one having a problem or are we having some type of you know a large scale outage?" So that would be my fallback method if my cell phone didn't work and we didn't have um any other means to communicate with somebody I may have to physically drive to my 911 center and uh you know try to figure out what the problem was so uh but with that it's taking me out of service i'm not able to continually provide the service to community i'm not on a on patrol for example i'm driving to a dispatch center to to find out what's what's wrong with our communications um so that's the that's the general um the four general layers and this this shouldn't have to be more complicated than it needs to be but there are several considerations which we'll dive into a little bit a little bit later in the uh in the uh webinar on what to consider but I really like this this uh analogy that I'm going to go over with you on uh what is pace planning and and kind of hopefully this will um keep it in in simple in in in a simple perspective for you if you want to cook and you're at home and you have an all electric house for example and or an apartment there's no power so your microwave doesn't work you can't turn on uh your range and and cook anything for dinner what do you do uh in my case uh I go out to on my my deck my my back porch and I have a uh a gas grill turn it on i can cook some hamburgers make some dinner uh you know using that technology however let's say I I did not refill my propane tank and it's it's it's gone or I don't have a backup for that then I may go down to my storage area in my house and pull out all my camping equipment and bring out one of those gas stoves that you can you can take camping with you with a small propane tank and uh use that to to get through the night right to to be able to cook my dinner and if that doesn't work or maybe it's it's faulty or that tank is empty as well and I have nothing else to do I may just have to you know put some put some wood on the fire and you know it's it's s'mores for dinner that night so that's that's an easy way of describing this concept in a in a very practical u way which doesn't have anything to do with communications and that's something that we want really want to stress that pace planning uh while it is a communications um redundancy tool it's not uh just strictly for the type of communications that one would think of so communications methods uh who commu who communicates and how do you communicate so as we all know in the modern world there's a lot of different ways and that these slides you know bring these out uh everything from social media email um platforms such as this or Microsoft Teams for example uh your cell phone uh a lot of different uh radio uh platforms as well and some of these if you're not if you're joining this call and you're not from an emergency management uh type of background you may not have heard of these but these are alternate um alternate radio systems besides what you would think emergency responders have so this is pretty much a toolbox of communications methods that we can we can look at and these are no particular order uh users however whatever you do have at your organization all of your users in order to really accomplish this uh need to be trained any technologies that they do not use often like for example if you have a cache of uh satellite phones uh you know at your at your headquarters or at your command center that you use in emergencies but nobody really understands it are they locked or is there a specific programming um method or uh security key or anything that you need to to use uh for those radio systems if you're not training on these systems then you're not going to be able to use them in an emergency simply having them on the shelf or having them available is really insufficient for an organization to maintain its level of uh redundancy and so that's some of the ways we communicate and the next thing you know something for for each of you on a call to think about is who do you as members of of a broad set of uh communities need to communicate with each other and I'm just going to go highlight some of these um in in you know pretty much in a clockwise fash fashion starting with the public to public so the ecosystem that we're talking about refers to communications among all entities from incident planning through response and recovery uh the ecosystem is broader than just first respon the first responder community uh there's four segments and we'll kind of go over these uh a little bit more in detail uh through the uh the next slides but one is public to public uh the first one I'm going to talk about and that's pretty much you know how does the public share information with other members of the public so think of your social medias think of your social networks and and um you know calling your neighbor and calling your your parents that may live across the country or you know your brother or sister family members and friends um that that that's you know what what are you who are you trying to communicate with and what type of tools do you use to communicate public to public then there's government to public and I always think of the um emergency action or the emergency messaging that comes on your TV every once in a while where you're in the middle of a program and something comes on and there's this test message uh that you know that that reoccurs and says this is just a test we're testing the emergency broadcast system so this is where the government in case of um in case of some type of disa impending disaster um you know sends information out that there's a hurricane uh coming or there's a storm or uh most recently the Amber Alerts you know you may have a um a missing child or a kidnapping or something happen and all of a sudden your your cell phones go off and whether you want them to or not they they go off and you get that Amber alert message that comes out so that's like a mass mass warning system that uh goes out to the public for you know a variety of of reasons then you have information that goes to the the government for the public from the public sector so think of it um as your alarm system in your house or just simply picking up the phone and calling the 911 center um and then there's government to government which is um agencies both state local federal interacting and and communicating with each other through a variety of platforms so again public to public cell phones landline phones your social networks uh face to face email these are all different things that um you know we try to emphasize supporting public communications because it's not just about reaching first responders sometimes it's just reaching you know your a family member who's uh you know possibly in an area where there's a lot of storms and and uh uh you know disasters or they're in an earthquake zone or something like that something happens and you're trying to reach out to them so um those are um those are things those are needs and uh things that you can develop your own pace plan for government to public again some of these like the uh emergency alert systems social media email uh general outreach in person you know going through a disaster site uh those are all uh ways that the the government reaches the public and you know again to think of of why this is relevant is that's the type of information that's being exchanged but uh I really want you to everybody to to consider the infrastructure that we use to move the messages and to communicate with with these different sectors or the these different audiences so you know 911 text to 911 your non-emergency phone numbers and some of the others that I've listed those are public to government you know how can how can somebody that needs assistance uh reach you in in whatever type of u environment that you work in and then government to government is how we communicate with each other both within our agencies or our our work groups as well as to external agencies um however government like others has has a certain number of pathways to in which to communicate and some of these here you know involve uh land mobile radio uh phones uh various levels of email both things on on the on the sensitive or restricted side uh computer AED dispatch is is a good one you know so 911 center uh gets a call they process that message and they transmit it to the fire department they also transmit it to the police department and a lot of that can be done uh through moving data between different government entities or government agencies so who needs to be part of the plan or or uh who needs to plan or be a part of the plan it's pretty much an all all of the above approach whether your communications occur on land mobile radios a desk phone uh cellular phones email fax machine or any other method you should have a plan for an alternative communication when your primary fails so uh pace plan creates a framework for your options and then you have to plan it practice it and plan again and don't just practice until you execute it correctly and then stop it okay we got this let's move on to the next um uh next next thing in our life or in our organization you have to practice it until one it can't go wrong and then to refresh it because pace plans are not something that typically uh are are in place or triggered uh often and if if they are then you're really in a bad spot or your primary communication system is not stable so we'll now discuss communications failures how they occur and what to do about them so what are communications threats to your specific communications pathways that's that's really an individual question because we all come from different organizations and different industries um what could go wrong and why could it go wrong and the key takeaway from this question or from this um this self-evaluation if you will is is the subsystem the same for the various options within your your layered communications approach so there's a definition we like to like to read because it really uh take a look at what a threat is and that that's an ever ever ever changing and ever evolving uh element in today's world so NIST the National Institutes of Standards and Technology identifies that as any circumstance or event with the potential to adversely impact organizational operations including missions functions image or reputation including organizational assets or individuals through an information system via unauthorized access destruction disclosure modification of information or denial of service that's a lot for a definition but it it really is a multifaceted um approach to pace planning where you have to consider cyber threats you have to consider insider threats in your organization somebody who may not intentionally um you know wish to do harm but for lack of training or lack of understanding of how a technology system works um you know unplugs something or hits a button they shouldn't have to that they shouldn't have access to or sometimes uh we see this a lot with technology is people have more rights and privileges to a specific platform than they really need to as a user and they're not a technician or they're not a supervisor role so all of a sudden in an in an inadvertent um act by by a uh somebody from within your organization can cause a a uh a lot of disruption when it comes to communications so we're going to talk a little bit more about some sample causes of systems failures so these again say could be user error they could be power outages um radio frequency inter you know interferences uh failures in radio systems cellular network uh congestion or failure failure uh loss of internet and that could be done through some type of a broken connection like your your your data provider is having a infrastructure problem in your area that you live or work and that's causing your internet to go down and your kids to go crazy because they can't get on their social media uh could be a network problem it could be a cyber crime um uh cyber uh incident so uh email as well a lot of us communicate as a primary uh means of communication uh through email if my email my Outlook's not opening up when I log into work tomorrow I'm going to be on the phone with my supervisor and saying "Hey I can't get on my my email are you having the same problem is this something local to my um my computer my internet service provider or something going going south with uh our agency?" But that's my pace plan i'm I'm using my phone to call or text my supervisor because I can't get a hold of him on my email so another important uh effort here is to report u some of these issues and understanding who within your organizations you should report that information to um what we do need to do and not do during um What we need to do uh during the the incident is to report it um the reporting stain short starts with everybody as individuals who and and where you report the problem depends on who you are in your organizations and uh you know what who that that designated individual or individuals are if you have a help desk you may have to report it to the help desk and they have protocols in place to to disseminate the information for action uh if you're in a smaller agency you're going to call probably your IT department or contact your IT department to let them know about this uh reporting is not necessarily done in the heat of the moment but it's necessary to to identify further problems so there there's some preventative measures here as well uh during intermittent failures or obviously everyone's going to understand when everything goes wrong for any type of sustained period of time so your communications unit IT department radio sh whatever it may be uh need some detailed information to determine the determine the causes of the problems all the information is very important um sometimes with end users they they don't feel what's important that uh you know some elements of of a a uh a breakdown or interruption in technology was was important to to them or they're trying to um solve the problem themselves and they don't report it or don't report all the details but uh somebody within that understands your technology uh from the operations side of the house should be able to to work with your organizations to do that so building a pace plan again uh earlier we discussed this concept at a more higher level in the next few slides we're going to hit each segment in more detail um just remember that alternate and contingency can sometimes have similar solutions but just different technologies that uh that we're going to go over so your primary in pace is the channel device or system that you're using during normal operations so understanding as best as you can how your primary system works is very uh very beneficial by doing so it helps you to react to operational problems when possible workarounds that can help you communicating before moving to your alternate so your alternate um determine what your al alter al alternate method can or can do that your primary does so again when I I was using the uh example of my radio while I was in my law enforcement capacity um you know I may be able to send data on on some uh on some on some processes through my my mobile data systems um however switching to the alternate even though I'm using the same technology that technology may not be set up to send and receive data between users so if by switching a channel to a different frequency or to a different uh network if you will you may not be able to have the same capacity uh to do that because maybe your IT department have have uh locked down your system to where uh it's only going to be used for voice communication and they don't want data being sent because they don't want it to be sent inadvertently to somebody outside of that core network so you know in in radio systems for example uh direct uh or simplex channels work without a repeater or radio system so the people in this example that you're going to be working with are in very close proximity again I'm going to be using some law enforcement examples uh because that's that's my that's my background so if I'm you know on a patrol type of assignment and I'm spread out across my jurisdiction I'm going to be using my my radio system to hit the the repeater which um they're retransmitting my message or my signal across the entire you know jurisdiction so everybody can speak to everybody regardless of where they're at within a given given area however if I'm going to be doing a uh a tactical type of uh operation where you know we're executing a search warrant for example on um on a a small location I may switch to the direct uh network because my radio uh network that I the people that I need to communicate with um I don't need to have that information broadcast all over uh the county and there's some somewhat of a a delay in in doing that when using a repeater where if I put it on simplex I can simply uh speak to the person that's right next to me or on the other side of the building or inside the residence or or the the establishment that we're conducting a raid on for example um and it it's quicker and you don't have the the pause of your radio reaching out to a repeater to send the same message just to the person right next to you so some radio systems um have some additional options uh such as trunking failoft and simplex again you would have to understand what those radio systems uh work and here's a kind of a policy thought for for you to consider is a personal email account uh allowable as an alternative so if your email uh from your company or your government entity uh is unavailable can you send your boss an email from your personal email to his his personal email or government email uh that that those are some considerations that you have to understand within the organization that that allows even though many do that it may be a policy violation because of how you're communicating or what information you're communicating now moving on to contingency is that's usually when things get a little bit more complicated because um you're specifically going to look for a different subsystem to facilitate the uh communication but you're not relying on the same technology so if in daily use you use a contingent uh system might be a cell phone or uh you know back in the day we had pay phones right so if I couldn't get out on my on my radio we would drive to the nearest pay phone and call 911 to our dispatch center to check in it's like hey what's going on with the radios um we're using a separate a separate type of communications uh platform or subsystem to be able to facilitate that communication uh which is great for redundancy purposes however it there's also a a a um uh reduction in the type of communications that you may or may not be able to to do that especially when it when it comes to information technology system uh information technology systems so it sometimes would require additional types of equipment that than what your organization may issue you uh for example during the presidential inauguration uh you know besides using the infrastructure that's existing in Washington DC a setup of alternate repeaters were were were placed uh uh within that area uh different lines of communications were established such as specific uh you know meetings like Microsoft teams um you know and and other other um uh platforms were used to accommodate this huge influx of activity that was happening from a multitude of different agencies so this is where the um the subsystems uh significantly change when moving from uh alternate to contingency in emergency almost you know um almost anything can go here as long as the method can work reliable as your emergency method so runners are are usually reliable uh because you can always walk drive uh or otherwise get to uh a focal point uh in order to do that but ensure your plan uh clarifies where they're going how they're going to get there the routes if there's any type of credentiing issues or rally points um it's very uh very crude uh method but it's one that is pretty much your last resort so taking a look at this let's say in an office environment where you know the term runner uh could maybe have some practical implications right you you uh your primary communication may be your email and your email is not working in your office so what do you do you you move to making a phone call from your desk phone well if your email and your desk phone are operating on the same backbone the same subsystem um they're they're they're likely not both not going to work even though they're alternate methods by using the same subset so then you may move to your contingency which is your your uh work cell phone or your personal cell phone if if uh if all I'll say if if allowed um however if if that doesn't work you may just have to take the elevator or take the stairs down a couple floors to your coworker who works in a different part of your building and you know have a physical uh one-on-one conversation with them on something that you normally would be able to do just via an email so I know we've really hit the different levels and and some of the different um aspects of of the of the different elements of PACE but what's really important is the users need to recognize on their own or with direction or whatever that your organization has put in their plan when to change to another means of communication there's various reasons for doing so and not doing so um are there public uh safety or uh you know activities that aren't being accomplished because people can't communicate um you know are lives or property in danger because people can't communicate you know if you can't communicate you can't operate right so our my last uh patrol crew that I was the the lieutenant of we already had this kind of informally put into place if I try to get on my radio uh after three calls into dispatch I you usually would get a response back from one of my counterparts that were working the road like "Hey I I can hear you but they apparently can't." So I knew automatically we would switch to to cell our cell phones if our cell phones if I couldn't get a hold of dispatch maybe there was a bigger problem in the area then you know we already had pre-desated areas where we would you know meet and and do in-person briefings and and situational awareness uh activities on so we we had that set up but we knew that after a certain degree of failure that certain things were going to happen automatically uh other organizations especially the larger you get uh they they may need some level of supervisory or management level um uh requirements to switch from different uh elements of pace only you and your organizations can can decide that but whatever you decide as a trigger uh it needs to be uniformally um understood that you know after so many attempts after so many minutes of inactivity after a certain type of event um or after uh somebody's specific approval um these these transitions are going to occur and that can only come with not only identifying your pace elements but also understanding when to switch and how long you need to stay on with with each uh element so how do you switch it it can depend and some considerations um that are highly dependent on the systems the processes the users again the nature of the problem do you uh how do you know that everybody has for lack of better words got the message that we're now moving to a different level of pace um is there a roll call you know do do a is it is it your SOP to do a combo check and have everybody uh log in and and to check in to verify that they're on that that secondary system um is there a default that everybody understands um as the lowest level of of PACE and beyond that there is going to be no communications unless it's in-person communications so while the while while you're transitioning to PACE you should also incorporate periodic check-ins when you're outside of your primary um and then you know a lot of this is is again depending on the operational environment that you live that you live and work in but um knowing how to switch and when to switch and again what we're going to cover is how to switch back uh is also uh an important factor somebody is monitoring the primary channel that you typically use once that's back up and running uh does everybody know that it's it's it's uh become functional again and how how is it how does that message uh get filter through your organization so next I'm going to talk about some resources to help you uh level up your PA pace plans and this will cover the government emergency telecommunication services or gets wireless priority services uh the PTS app and then the telecommunication services priority system so uh an important note um you know some of these services are free and uh they just need to you you can become enrolled in them uh fairly easily if you if you fall within the uh categories of um emergency services critical infrastructure national defense national security and I'll try to explain that at through a high level review but the first one I wanted to speak to is gets the gets um provides priority calling over landline infrastructure so just remember that gets deals with landline telephone systems uh where wireless priority the next one I'm going to touch on is wireless it's just that it's one's for cellular and one's for for wired communications or your traditional landline systems gets can be used as part of your pace plan to enhance your voice communications capabilities um you can you can sometimes it's not your specific uh phone system that is uh degraded uh it just the network is so overloaded and you get this in in areas where you have uh some type of significant disaster or significant event occurring i like to use the the um the 911 the September 11th analogy you know that because so many people were affected on September 11th because everyone was worried about their relatives in different parts of the country it wasn't something that was really isolated um you know just to New York and Washington DC but you had anybody who had anybody a friend or family member on the plane that day was concerned about them and everyone's trying to call their loved one their friend their colleagues to see if they're okay or if they happened to be on one of the planes that went down that day and our communications infrastructure was so overwhelmed and so overloaded that day that you just couldn't make a call you couldn't make a call from your cell phone a lot of your Wline phones uh went down and that's that's you know there's only so much capacity with our our telecom uh companies where gets uh works similarly to WPS but it allows you if you fall into a critical infrastructure uh uh community to get priority access when uh when the rest of the telecom uh signals are are ba basically overwhelmed you have to register for this and the way it works is you have an access number uh that you'll get and then a personal identification number that you call the access number it'll go through you enter your PIN number and then you place the call that you need to make so if you're at home and you need to call the home office and the circuits are overloaded either where you live or where you're calling or somewhere in between gets is a tool to help you bypass that in an emergency situation provided that you're you know some type of first responder or your critical in infrastructure entity and during emergencies 98% of gets calls uh are completed regarding regardless of congestion or degradation however I will say this if the the the physical infrastructure is down gets will not work so if your phone lines are uh physically disabled because they have uh they've been you know uh bad storm came down and power is out and phone lines are are laying on the ground this is not going to work for you but it it does deal very very well with congestion wireless priority services is a similar uh program that uh is is though focused on cellular communications so if I'm using my phone to call my boss's cell phone and the the network is congested on either both or somewhere in between uh you know in that in that call uh pattern wireless priority services will work very similarly to gets um where it's a service provided and managed by SIZA and we work very closely with with the FCC and this will uh provide some reserved bandwidth for uh those of us in emergency management critical infrastructure and different sectors and generally 95% % of calls made with WPS um are are completed and um there's a combination of the two that I highly recommend that uh that those um that those of you that are interested in the service uh is to use both now to do that how do I remember what's my PIN number and and how do I you know go from gets and WPS well we've made a uh daughter app that is uh basically will do all the work for you it's extremely efficient and effective way to easily use gets and WPS it's uh available through an app store on Google Play it's free to download but the registration for the services themselves have to go through SIZA it allows you to uh place a call store your pins uh on your your personal or if if you have a government device or your uh a company device where you need privileges to install this uh this daughter app uh you can you'll have to secure that however it's it's a the the the app itself is is free to install and to uh place on your phone so you just need to get registered for the accounts but in in this way let's say I'm on my cell phone and I'm trying to reach a landline phone well if I only use uh WPS it will it'll it'll allow me to connect to a cell tower and to place that call but if the landline portion is the one I'm having problems with then it'll stop at that point and the same thing with gets if I'm using a gets number to make an outgoing call um or gets pin or get service to go to go out it it'll only it'll stop at the the cell cell towers where gets and WPS you can do a combination call to uh process your call completion regardless of the service that you'll use and the last element I want to talk about is tele telecommunication services priority well TSP it's a uh a program managed by SIZA but it's uh uh provided by F the Federal Communications Commission which mandates that service providers in the telecom industry uh prior prioritize voice and data circuit installation and restoration for critical infrastructure and uh entities now this is a little bit more complicated there is uh some states do charge a fee for uh for infrastructure owners to have this service but if uh the world goes south and you need additional circuits or uh some type of communication service services restored by registering for this service in advance you get the priority versus uh the general public on getting your systems back online so the those were just you know touch points and um for for everybody to be aware of the programs next Wednesday at 2 p.m on the 30th uh SIZA is hosting a webinar that will specifically get into the gets WPS and TSP programs so if you're interested one of my colleagues is going to drop the registration link uh here in the chat but if you're on our email distribution lists or on our social media feeds there there should have been uh some postings that you can go back and and take a look at but if if at at a minimum our chat should have the um should have the registration link here shortly so pace plan development we're going to talk about uh single and multi- agency PACE plans so uh diversity is the basic premise for any successful plan and we want you to think about the subsystems that each level will function on it does no good to have an alternate contingent or emergency level if the systems all rely on the same uh connections or subsystems as the primary system that you're looking at uh so you want to think about alternatives that have little or nothing in common with each other when it comes to common connections so uh we want to keep these plans as simple as pro possible making the job done easier in the in the heat of the moment or heat of the battle um you know once complete users should need to learn and understand and practice the plans uh you need to identify when to move uh from the primary system and back and uh this will also give you an an opportunity or platform to practice some emergency uh training with others in your in your uh area of responsibility uh step one build your internal pace plan if you can't communicate you can't respond right so you need to do that internally within your organizations and then share and pra practice your PACE plan with your interoperability partners that means uh if you're you know private industry uh it's a good idea to reach out to your emergency management agency in in the locations that you're uh that you have offices or uh uh interest in because this would be a great way to to meet and integrate PACE planning with some additional uh first responding a first responder agencies and uh other critical infrastructure networks that are independent interdependent with you um you know during during crisis situations everyone thinks that uh you know during an emergency you know they're uh they're they're alone but you know I never thought of you know home improvement stores for example as as critical infrastructures because uh you know when people need building materials and you know wood to secure their their facilities or to re make repairs where do they go you know they they go to your uh your Lowe's and your Home Depot and and uh you know other other private sector entities that that provide all those services that's the same thing with groceries um you're going to go to the grocery store and who's the grocery store have to communicate with the transportation companies that bring the uh the goods to to market you know and where are they at you know uh in this whole process so understanding for in just in those quick examples how one agency is reliant and and works well with another agency is really important across across sectors uh regardless of where you're from today so uh the first thing to to really take a look at when when going through this is really to to determine to get a communications needs assessment what are the business needs uh that your organization needs to to look at and really the the first three rights that I mentioned are information persons and time so what type of information is critical important or desirable at least in those those first three um you know uh a as you move through this this uh hierarchy of pace there's going to be some information you are just not going to be able to uh transmit or uh share with with uh stakeholders so you have to determine what's critical what's important what's nice to have but if you don't have it you you can live without it for a period of time and always use caution when considering uh subsystems commonality when when when doing pace for example email phone like I mentioned before uh both operate on uh the same type of back hall circus circuits which are uh internet based right now at least your desk phones um so that that's you know if you're relying on on those two to to be independent of each other they're not necessarily even though they they perform a different type of function and you can send a lot of data and a lot of files and everything over your email and you can't really do the same type of information sharing over a phone but you know those are uh those are u uh failure points and uh and another thing to consider are the security requirements for the pathways so you know how sensitive is your information that you need to uh share through those pathways what's confidential you know how much data integrity do you need to maintain and you know how much of that needs to be available at that time so what are the alternatives to the usual communications pathways so you want to consider the diversity of technology uh radio frequency bands uh power sources the type of infrastructure as well as your um you know your physical location that you're located at you know there's ideal versus good enough two very uh two very broad um you know measures of success that only you and your organization can determine based on your mission and and what you need uh as you navigate this process if you don't know what those are ask your organization and you know get that get that that conversation going with leadership and and um they can help guide what you determine your are your critical information requirements uh when you're navigating this process and what are the limitations of the different elements that as you move forward you know for example there could be um the capacity of how much data that you can you can send the range and the speed at which it's sent uh the type of uh security for example you may have a policy that certain data can only be sent uh you know with a level of encryption and uh other technologies cannot always support that level of encryption sometimes uh I'm sorry lost my place there for a second like even with radio communications we have encrypted radios and we have things that are sent in plain text if you're used to sending a lot of sensitive uh voice data over a a system that is encrypted you know you may not be able to send that same uh level of security or the same type of information uh however if it's an emergency situation you may not need to you just may need to know you know where something's happening and how to dispatch the appropriate uh personnel to that that given location and not a lot of sensitive uh background information on on that that normal transmission so not having a primary pathway may be okay for less important communications uh you know in a failure in in in a failure type situation so you know deciding on trigger points um when how and and you know by whose authority do you do you plan for the switch is this something that's going to be automatically um popular automatically triggered based on a certain level of events or are you going to need supervisory uh approval within your organization who contacts whom for switch confirmation uh the again the larger your organization is the more detailed uh some of that information you know has to be and another thing with with organizations um you know it it's it's much simpler for a standalone let's say a a business or standalone facility to to have a pace plan but if you're you know somebody coming from the corporate world where you may have a corporate head office located in uh you know that centralizes all your operations and all your corporate leadership is at at a a central place let's use Washington DC for example with the federal government and you have satellite locations um across the country so let's say that corporate office is in DC and it's a trucking company you know for example is the vice president of the company need to have direct contact with that truck driver probably not right he's probably going to have uh he or she is probably going to have contact with that that hub um that regional office or that that regional warehouse for example the warehouse is going to have to have contact with the with the field elements right in your organization in this example a truck driver so the pace plan between what I like to call the mother ship right the headquarters elements and the regional elements is going to be it's going to look a lot different based on the communications needs between the smaller regional offices and the field elements that are that are uh involved in whatever your mission set is so you have to understand that the level of supervision should be uh generally speaking should be uh uh delegated to the to the lowest uh possible element if if that's in fact the way that your organization decides to go and understanding the pathway so again talking a little bit about emergency communications just taking a look at the the the structure that uh and the technology behind the scenes is it can be very uh complicated take a look at a typical um flowchart on what what happens with a a traditional 911 call you have the public who's the caller is using a cellular or wired phone call to call the 911 center the 911 call taker answers the phone gets the information and then dispatches uh or sends the information through a CAD system computer rated dispatch system to the fire department dispatcher EMS dispatcher or law enforcement dispatcher now my my case I just want to do a quick shout out at this point because the agency I came from the call taker and the radio dispatcher were the same person so a moment you're on a call you're getting the the who what and where of a situation and you're turning around and hitting a button and transmitting that out via radio to somebody else so you know last week was National Telecommunicators Week and I really want to you know do a shout out to those uh those heroes that uh too often get get overlooked and and uh not recognized for the the tremendous work that they do but again in this in this scenario the call taker gets it it's electronic information that's uh sent to the dispatcher the dispatcher then uses CAD maybe a mobile terminal if the agency is equipped or at a minimum a radio call that goes out to the fire EMS or law enforcement agencies so there's various you know points of failure here you have a you could have a point of failure between the caller and the 911 center the 911 center and their internal CAD procedures their CAD terminals may go down and then from the dispatching uh via radio or CAD terminals if they're so equipped to the different fire EMS and law enforcement uh field elements so understanding the potential points of failure is really important understanding you know how how information flows within your organization and there's different perspectives of PACE needs you have your equipment persons systems inter agency and and going back to our personal example of a grill right with the electric range and open fire uh portion these are rated just as an example of primary alternate contingency and emergency uh based on you know the type of equipment who's involved with it what type of systems if there's an inter agency component to that um how do we navigate and move between uh those different elements uh of PACE needs and then As you move from um you know primary to emergency your operations can get changed they could get harder simpler slower or faster um make sure every everybody understands the drill everybody understands uh what can and cannot be reasonably accomplished as you navigate uh these different levels so again this is a basic PACE template uh typically uh used for a single agency or group again doesn't have to be difficult just look at the filledin example again you have a desk phone cell phone uh fax machine or a runner relay excuse me take a look at an exercise using u any town radio system paste so um remaining blanks you know what would you put in you have a trunked radio system uh you have a maybe a loner uh talk group on a neighboring uh trunked radio system or neighboring uh network if you will a contingency would this be uh some type of a group chat or some type of other technology that uh that you know the the the group would use and then what would be an emergency and sometimes emergency and contingency can can overlap together as well so let's say you're in a situation where you have a limited amount of satellite phones right satellite phones usually are not subject to the elements and restrictions uh that that are happening in in a specific area but you only have so many of them so your contingency may be satellite phones but your not everybody in your network could is equipped with one for you know variety of reasons uh so your emergency uh plan could be you know linking up with whoever has a a contingency um supply or contingency um method of communicating with with others in your um your situation and then relaying that information in person to the rest of the participants and there's different styles uh that are accepted in and how to to write this up as a pace plan uh note the breakdown by functional pathways uh this is this is a little bit of a military uh example so you have your UHF frequencies your VHF frequencies uh different different channels then when you look at a multi- agency pace plan is is more for uh planned events or or you know largecale incidents where you have uh your primary alternate and contingency emergency levels along with who who all the different inter agency partners are involved so it's easier to see it when it's filled in but uh a single agency multiode multi mode P uh template um it's for a single agency uh to capture multiple critical technologies on one page uh don't forget your triggers and that's what one looks like for a regional uh pace plan for a single agency so for example for data we're looking at a email uh alternate your Microsoft teams contingency you know maybe an Adobe connect uh emergency is a sharepoint and then you know for uh an additional level is you know maybe a personal computer something completely off the uh the primary uh technology system and this this shows an example of a joint task force national capital region pace plan so you know thi

2025-05-02 15:08

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