Case Study: Yosemite National Park Service ECC
Sacramento, California, June 6, 2003

Yosemite National Park, located in California's Sierra Nevada, is a year-round destination for over 3 million visitors drawn to the Park's picturesque mountain and valley scenery. Yosemite is home to breathtaking waterfalls, lush meadows and giant sequoia forests. It's also under the care of the Yosemite National Park Service ECC (Emergency Communications Center).

Park emergency services are coordinated via the ECC, a 4 position PSAP which dispatches 4,100 responses per year. The Yosemite ECC dispatches National Parks Rangers, Fire Crews and EMS Response. A Helicopter is also available for Search and Rescue, as well as Fire and Law Enforcement support.

The Communications Center moved two years ago from its original building in the valley to a new facility at park Headquarters in El Portal, and with the move came a new integrated emergency response system.

The Old ...

The old system provided call handling via multi-button phone sets and ALI display on a small CRT. Dispatching was handled with pen and paper - everything was written down. Status updates required shuffling through multiple sheets to find the right sheet and write down the status change. The resulting record keeping and documentation were time consuming. Radio communications were controlled via a separate hardware radio console.

... and the New

Yosemite needed an integrated system where emergency call handling and dispatch operated on a same workstation at each position. Rather than dealing with the complexity and expense of integrating applications from different vendors, the center selected from Positron Public Safety System's integrated product suite. This approach provided the Center with applications that are already integrated with each other out of the box. The Yosemite ECC contracted with SBC Communications for the procurement, installation and maintenance of the new system.

Each of the center's four positions is equipped with a Compaq workstation computer with multiple video ports - these allow the three NEC Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens at each position to act as one, under seamless control of a single mouse and keyboard. Each of the following applications is accessible via its own screen:

Call Handling
Power 911 IWS (Intelligent Workstation) provides the center with full on-screen control of emergency and administrative call handling. The application also provides integrated call recording and TTY communications. All positions have access to both local and PSAP-wide call activity lists. These lists include all calls being handled throughout the PSAP (with details such as call status and ALI before answer), previous calls received from a current caller and previous calls handled by the current calltaker. Answering calls is easier with multiple queues that prioritize calls on a first-come first-serve basis - this allows the Yosemite ECC to prioritize 9-1-1 and Administrative calls on separate queues. Outbound calls are easier to place - they can be initiated via preprogrammed numbers assigned to buttons or via selection from the lists of previous calls.

Computer Aided Dispatch
Power CAD provides the center with Computer Aided Dispatch tailored to the center's dispatch needs. Agents have simultaneous access to both a graphical drag-and-drop interface and a command line interface. Resources and Responses are listed in customizable windowed lists that can be filtered based on a wide range of criteria. The drag-and-drop interface provides an intuitive way to assign one (or many) resources to one (or many) incident responses - simply by dragging items from one list to another. Status changes are easily selected via drop-down lists embedded in the Resource lists. The command line is also available should any users prefer to type commands instead of using the mouse.

Radio Communications
Power RADIO gives agents on-screen control of the center's Motorola radio system. Radio functions previously accessed via the old hardware console are now available on the workstation's configurable screen, using the same mouse and keyboard control used for call handling and dispatch control. The graphical user interface allows users to switch to additional screens where other radio functions such as Paging are made accessible.

The Yosemite ECC system is configured for reliability and performance. A Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) Local Area Network (LAN) is used to share information between the positions and database server. Each position can store activity information locally should communication with the database server be lost, with the server then automatically updated once back online. This self-healing architecture ensures continuity of historical data used for queries and MIS reports.

A distributed architecture gives each position independent control of both telephony and radio to ensure no single point of failure. Backroom equipment is also configured with redundant components - "hot" spares that monitor active modules and automatically take over if required.

The Yosemite ECC's new system greatly simplifies call handling and dispatching tasks by providing all functions under a unified graphical user interface. With the elimination of manual record keeping and documentation, dispatchers also have more time to concentrate on the emergencies at hand. The common platform approach and advanced information sharing provide for richer integration between the applications, and easy future migration to additional applications from the integrated product suite.

For more information, please contact:
  Paul G. Guest
  Director of Marketing
  info@positron911.com
  800-443-3313

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