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GCN Home > 07/21/08 issue

Anaheim covers the angles

By Trudy Walsh

City officials in Anaheim, Calif., had no shortage of information technology systems. They had several computer-aided dispatch systems — one for fire, one for police, one for other emergencies. They managed calendars on another system, and they managed their vehicles on yet another.

“But you couldn’t see the whole picture,” said David Brown, who works for EDS as a program manager of Anaheim’s Enterprise Virtual Operations Center (EVOC).

City officials wanted to put together a center that could give employees a broader view of city emergency operations.

The first attempt had a 3-D client, Brown said. “You felt like you were standing in the middle of a room. The mouse would spin you one way and you see what looked like bulletin boards on a wall.” The idea was to simulate an operations center with the user surrounded by video screens and cameras. It was fine for a flight simulator but not good for an emergency operations center, Brown said. The simulated operations center was hard to program and maintain, and the need for something simpler soon became clear.

Anaheim officials decided to use a secure Web browser to integrate 13 data sources, including weather conditions from Weather.com, the police department’s Informix database, three SQL Server databases and an Oracle 10g database that contained parcel information.

The resulting system, EVOC, also pulls together radio, camera and Microsoft Exchange e-mail systems via an Internet Explorer browser.

Dispatchers can type 911 calls into the system and make them available on EVOC, Brown said.

The EVOC platform, which has been in use for four years, has as many as 500 registered users, most of them city employees, Brown said. He added that it also supports users in other California cities, including Fullerton, Orange, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Fountain Valley.

Anywhere access

The Web-based platform can be accessed from almost anywhere. One Sunday a few years ago, Brown saw on CNN that fires had broken out in the Sierra Peak area near Anaheim. From his home in Georgia, he tapped into EVOC and its WebEOC application, a piece of third-party software that functions as an incident management system. Brown could click on an incident and get details about it. He could pull up radio chatter and listen to firemen talking to one another.

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