Program

On March 27, 2023, a mass shooting occurred at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church in America parochial elementary school in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, when 28-year-old Aiden Hale, a former student of the school, broke into the school and killed three nine‑year‑old children and three adults before being shot and killed by two Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officers. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.

In this scenario, we will discuss the impacts of the shooting on the Nashville 9-1-1 center, how current technology assisted in the response as well as the art of the possible to include real-time school safety notification and incident management systems, artificial intelligence and the integration of mission critical services into the ESINet network.

Today’s 9-1-1 centers generally lack live video, accurate dynamic geo-location, real-time language translation, silent instant messaging, call triage during surge periods, or AI capabilities with the citizens they serve. Attendees will be presented with several success stories where technology makes possible these and other features in an NG9-1-1 environment.

On April 17, 2024, a multi-state 9-1-1 outage occurred impacting Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska. The causes and impacts are being investigated by the FCC. This significant outage underscores the vulnerability of our predominantly voice-only infrastructure.

During this session, learn about how the impacted ECCs managed through the outages with existing technologies, and hear strategies for employing NG9-1-1 technology to maintain operations in the future with increased reliability, redundancy, and resiliency.

The COVID 19 pandemic provided the catalyst for untethering the 9-1-1 call taker and dispatcher from the center. Emergency communications centers must remain resilient and provide critical services during significant incidents and events which could prevent employees from operating within the traditional brick-and-mortar 9-1-1 center. Remote operations can also play a role in addressing staffing challenges and preparing for the rollout of NG9-1-1. City of Alexandria has made significant advancements in remote ECC operations and will present successes, lessons learned, what’s next, and tips on how any center can create or expand remote capabilities.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024 was a multi-agency incident during which the swift actions of public safety personnel mitigated the loss of life from the event. This panel discussion will include personnel from agencies involved with the response and will cover the sequence of events leading up to the collapse, the immediate response actions, the crucial role of communication systems during the crisis, and what’s needed to improve communications technology.

What is the art of the possible? Leveraging public safety broadband, emergency communications centers today can innovate and explore all possibilities. By transitioning to Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) and using FirstNet, emergency communications infrastructure can be upgraded and moved to a digital framework. This session takes a deep dive into the synergies of NG9-1-1 and FirstNet, including as a failover for ESInet redundancy, remote call taking and dispatching across state lines, and holistic end-to-end broadband service. Come and help create the vision for what you want public safety broadband to do!