By Claudia Wayne, FirstNet Senior Advisor
More than 20 state and local public safety stakeholders from across the state of Maine gathered in Augusta for the initial consultation meeting on May 20, 2015. Placed around the meeting room that day were maps prepared by the FirstNet Maine team showing the state’s transportation routes and tribal lands. What is most striking about these maps is how clearly they show the amount of rural area in the state.
According to the Department of Census, Maine is the most rural state in the nation, and 90 percent of its land mass is forested. The rural and wooded nature of Maine featured heavily into the day’s discussions on FirstNet, the consultation process, data collection, and Maine’s FirstNet efforts and unique needs.
FirstNet Board member and Maine resident, Kevin McGinnis, attended the consultation and presented on how emergency medical services (EMS) could benefit from the nationwide public safety broadband network (NPSBN). As he discussed the ways a dedicated public safety broadband network could provide ambulance teams with more information about the incident to which they are responding, he emphasized how much more important that information can be in rural settings. “In Maine, the average rural discovery time is 16 minutes,” McGinnis told attendees. “We don’t have time for the ambulance to get out and discover exactly how bad the patient is.”
McGinnis described the ways FirstNet could allow an EMS team to know what vehicles were involved in a crash, for example, along with how likely it is that there are serious injuries. Additional applications running on the network could allow for seamless information exchanges with hospitals and even two-way video with doctors and nurses—something that can be especially valuable in a rural setting where the trip to the hospital is longer and EMS teams may have had less exposure to treating certain conditions and symptoms. You can see Kevin McGinnis talking about some of these EMS technologies on the FirstNet YouTube channel.
Other attendees from the state, including Maine State Police Chief Robert Williams and John Richards, Director of Radio Services for the Maine Office of Information Technology, touched on the reluctance of commercial broadband carriers to provide coverage in rural areas. Kevin Guimond, Chief of the South Portland Fire Department and an officer with Maine Fire Chiefs’ association, reminded the room of the special needs and budget limitations of volunteer departments, which are far more common outside of population centers. Also of note is the popularity of the state with tourists and visitors, and the draw of its recreational and wilderness areas, where radio and network coverage are limited or nonexistent.
The legislation that created FirstNet requires it to meet substantial rural milestones in each phase of network deployment. Conversations with states like Maine are a valuable part of understanding how FirstNet can work with the rural areas of the nation.
Thank you to Maine for a lively and productive consultation. You can learn more about Maine’s FirstNet-related efforts on its new website.
-Claudia
