England's Fire and Rescue Emergency Response to Use Intergraph

FiReControl, England's national fire and rescue emergency response infrastructure, will use incident response management solutions from Intergraph to enhance public and firefighter safety and provide rapid response for more than 50 million citizens.

FiReControl is to create a network of nine regional control centres to manage all fire and rescue resources across England for fast response times to save lives and property through a unified system providing advanced cross-regional interoperability and improved resource management. The system will enable a higher level of public service by providing the ability to spread localised peaks in demand across the regional centers, and it will help coordinate coherent responses to large scale incidents, thereby addressing a key national security and resilience goal for England.

FiReControl will have one of the world's largest service areas for an Emergency Service encompassing 50,000 sq. mi. (130,000 km2). Intergraph recently joined the consortium, led by European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) Defence and Security, responsible for delivering the project.

Control centre operators at the nine regional control centers will use Intergraph's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) solution to record and manage the critical information needed for effective and efficient incident response. Control centre personnel will benefit from interactive, real-time map displays of the location and status of incidents and nationwide resources, integrated with automatic call distribution and call handling software, action plans and pre-determined attendance plans for resource mobilisation. The system will be directly linked to fire station equipment and mobile data devices in fire service vehicles.

Decision-makers recently concluded that Intergraph's public safety technologies were best suited to meet FiReControl's scalability and ‘virtual control room' network requirements for optimised response in day-to-day operations and large-scale, national response scenarios. Intergraph's incident response management solution also fulfilled prerequisites for strategic security and emergency operations center (EOC) capabilities, which will enhance collaboration and information sharing, allowing fire and rescue emergency responders to work more cohesively when responding to large scale incidents.

"FiReControl will improve national resilience and bring unprecedented levels of cooperation and interoperability... For the first time, we shall have a national network with nine regional centres, all of which will be able to operate at peak times in a way that we have never seen before," said Shahid Malik MP, fire minister, Department for Communities and Local Government in a recent House of Commons debate.

"As the world leader in public safety and security incident response management solutions, Intergraph technologies provide more than 2,500 public safety agencies around the world with multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional capabilities for optimized emergency response," said R. Halsey Wise, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Intergraph Corp. "Intergraph brings to FiReControl the extensive knowledge and success garnered from deploying nationwide emergency response systems in Belgium, New Zealand and Portugal, and we are honoured to join EADS to support emergency preparedness and response initiatives throughout England."