he City of Chesapeake’s public safety departments and other critical city services were spread out across multiple locations with little-to-no data interconnectivity. Compounding this issue, the city’s wireless capabilities were restricted due to interference from nearby Federal agency offices and military outposts. Without an effective way to aggregate and share critical information for such a large area, interdepartmental communication was slow and inefficient.
During emergency activations, City of Chesapeake employees converted a 900-square-foot meeting room in the municipal center headquarters into a makeshift Emergency Operations Center (EOC). In addition to having limited seating and computers, this facility was in Flood Zone A—the first area evacuated during major weather events.
For nearly a decade, local public safety leadership and city officials explored possible strategies to consolidate the City of Chesapeake’s emergency services operations and improve situational awareness. Research teams from Chesapeake visited EOC sites across the country and consulted with a number of architects, engineers, and emergency management experts to determine a solution that would address the city’s unique environmental and technological needs.
In April 2015, the City of Chesapeake broke ground on a three-story, 51,000-square-foot Public Safety Operations Center (PSOC) to house critical city operations including a dedicated EOC, a 911 Emergency Call Center (ECC), a 311 Non-Emergency Call Center, and Fire and Police Training Administration spaces. With construction underway, city officials and other key stakeholders began researching vendors for the facility’s video wall solution.
Unlike many PSOCs, the City of Chesapeake’s facility required multiple video walls and auxiliary displays that could route data to different rooms across the building. In particular, the search committee wanted a vendor that would address two key needs:
- Dynamic, real-time data visualization to monitor land, ports, and sea in a large, highly populated area
- System-wide, cross-departmental data interconnectivity
After a months-long search, Haivision was selected to create a robust, turn-key visualization system for the entire PSOC.