New initiatives at Østjyllands Brandvæsen and Beredskab & Sikkerhed for a new joint control centre, operations manager function and the use of live video from incident sites are already showing good results.
The fire services Østjyllands Brandvæsen and Beredskab & Sikkerhed, which together cover eight municipalities and serve approximately 800,000 citizens in East Jutland, have seen major changes in the past six months.
The two emergency services have joined forces to establish a new joint control centre and a 24-hour operations manager function, which is now the focal point for all operational responses in the eight municipalities. The aim is to create a unified overview which will make it possible to mount an even stronger response and make better use of their combined resources when serious incidents occur.
The new set-up allows the management at the scene to concentrate fully on the incident itself. They don’t have to think about where they can get the extra resources, catering, relief personnel and so on that a major incident requires. The operations manager at the control centre will take care of that. The joint overview also makes it much easier to have resources ready for other simultaneous incidents.
We have been operating the joint control centre since October last year and with the operations manager fully on-call since 1 April. We can already see that it has had a positive effect, as it creates stable operations during major incidents and thereby a better use of our resources. It provides redundancy in the system and helps us to think ahead.
Jesper Hansen, Team leader, Østjyllands Brandvæsen
More eyes on the incident scene with live video
Along with the new joint control centre and operations manager function, the two emergency services have also embarked on a new era of streaming live video from the incident scene – a technology developed in collaboration with Bliksund.
Since November last year, the control centre has had the possibility of using SMS-to-Video. In this system, the control centre can send a video link to the caller, who can quickly send live video of the incident to the control centre with just a single click.
We have already experienced the positive effect of being able to receive live video from the caller. It allows us to gain an overall impression of what’s happening before we even arrive on the scene so that we can send the right resources. It also helps the firefighters to be better prepared for the incident they are responding to, says Jesper Hansen.
In addition, the incident command vehicles have been fitted with video cameras that can be remotely controlled by the operations manager and others in the control centre in order to monitor the incident scene.
Live video from the incident command vehicle at the scene is a great management tool. Typically, the incident commander may be in a very stressful situation where many things are happening at once. Here it’s good to have an extra pair of eyes, in the form of the operations manager at the control centre, who can help to assess the situation and organise the right resources in good time, concludes Jesper Hansen.
The changes at Østjyllands Brandvæsen and Beredskab & Sikkerhed are part of a strengthening of the fire services in East Jutland, in the wake of the Ministry of Defence’s analysis of the resilience of municipal emergency services.
