Prince George’s County EOC
Providing Homeland Security and 911 Operations With Mission Critical Communication Technology
The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) of Prince George’s County is a 46,000 square-foot facility that serves as the Office of Homeland Security headquarters as well as the County’s 911 back-up and emergency management center, fielding more than 1.3 million calls per year.
The County’s Office of Emergency Management sought enterprise-based video and control systems that would scale and interconnect with endpoints such as PCs, encoders, IP cameras, network video recorders (NVR) and/or other facilities and systems on the same network. The AVS needed to be able to drive multiple video walls in various locations connected by an IP network. The total solution would have to be configurable and expandable from a single output to a configurable display proportionate to the number of monitors recommended for the wall size available for a single array, requiring maximum utilization of wall space. The system would need to include the ability to do in-room presentations as well as teleconferencing and video conferencing with requirements for interconnectivity in designated areas, while other sites would operate as stand-alone entities. The entire solution would need to be easy to use for all end users during emergency situations. And, the timeline for completion from infrastructure planning to training was an aggressive three months.
The new design for the EOC included a comprehensive enterprise video display system, a Digital Media Presentation System (DMPS) for presentation control and a video wall, driven by VuWall. VuWall—selected for its reliability and user-friendly interface—manages the displays as desired by the end user and allows distribution of video across several displays. The DMPS affords substantial signal routing flexibility and high-performance processing without the need for separate components, providing flexibility and cost saving while delivering the performance and reliability demanded by mission critical environments.
Once described as the weakest link in the chain of radio communications interoperability in the Mid-Atlantic, the Prince George’s County EOC has been transformed into one of the leading 911 communications centers in the DC area.
