By Amanda Hilliard, FirstNet Director of Outreach
FirstNet’s Initial Consultation meeting with North Dakota last month was the 38th session in the first round of state consultations. With the completion of this meeting in North Dakota’s capitol building in Bismarck, FirstNet had met with two-thirds of the nation’s states and territories.
Although this process has reminded the FirstNet user advocacy team of just how vast and varied the nation is, certain commonalities are beginning to emerge as we strive to understand what public safety will need from a nationwide public safety broadband network (NPSBN). This session with more than 40 public safety stakeholders in North Dakota underscored two themes that we have heard in many other states. The first is that public safety is relying more and more on data-intensive public safety tools and applications. North Dakota’s use cases show some of the ways the state is currently using mobile data. The other common issue is that the networks those tools run on are often unavailable when and where public safety needs to respond due to challenges presented by terrain, borders, population distribution, emergencies, and special events.
North Dakota Single Point of Contact (SPOC) Mike Ressler, as well as Duane Schell and Travis Durick from the state Information Technology Department, representatives from the North Dakota Governor’s Office, Indian Affairs Commission, and others shared that the state’s large size and mostly rural terrain presents communications difficulties. Two other unique factors that present challenges in North Dakota are the state’s border with Canada and the oil boom of the past decade, which has caused hazardous material (HAZMAT) incidents to multiply. The consultation meeting allowed for an open and robust discussion of these coverage issues and the potential of a NPSBN to address them.
Coverage on the Border with Canada
Karen Kempert, Cavalier County Emergency Management
Despite carrier-reported footprints, Ms. Kempert said that more than 9,000 square miles along the Canadian border in North Dakota suffer from a lack of sufficient coverage. Meanwhile, there are approximately 1,100 public safety incidents per month along the border. A quarter of Cavalier County is a forest that runs into Canada, and there are numerous trail systems and events throughout the year that are affected by the lack of coverage. Ms. Kempert said commercial wireless carriers on both sides of the border deal with users pinging their towers from the other side, and often lower their signal strength to avoid it. Working with Canada to address the issue has not been successful, and every month, Cavalier County has to have hundreds of dollars of coverage charges reversed by Canadian providers due to U.S. users pinging Canadian towers, she added. The only way currently to address the coverage issues are with boosters in users’ devices or vehicles.
Fargo Fire Department & North Dakota State University (NDSU)
Gary Lorenz, Assistant Chief of Support Services
The Fargo Fire Department has a variety of regional duties, including public safety deployment and HAZMAT response. The department is increasingly data-dependent and relies on 16 Mobile Data Computers (MDCs) attached to battalion chiefs’ trucks and other frontline fire vehicles for incident response. The MDCs communicate with the department’s computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS). Fargo Fire is learning new ways to use data all the time. Fire inspectors are now sent out with tablets in hand for inspections of facilities, hydrants, etc. There are also five major venues at North Dakota State University (NDSU) with the capacity to house large events, including football games, to which the department deploys. Data services there tend to be reliable for the most part, but when the system starts to get saturated, MDCs and handheld devices stop receiving CAD/RMS messages. Assistant Chief Lorenz said the department would like to see a reliable LTE system that could prioritize public safety traffic.
Red River Regional Dispatch Center
Brian Zastoupil, Radio Systems Coordinator
Most of North Dakota’s eastern border is part of the Red River Valley, which is an old lake bed. When river levels rise and water overflows the riverbed, flood waters can spread for miles due to the generally flat terrain. This affects cities all along the river. There have been at least 10 significant flood events over the last 20 years due to heavy snow or rain in conjunction with the northward flow of the Red River. Coordinated responses with numerous federal, state, and local agencies, as well as non-governmental organizations, present a number of interoperability and coordination challenges. Flooding response along the river can be data-intensive, with a high value placed on streaming video that provides emergency operations centers (EOCs) with real-time images of flood levels. Mr. Zastoupil said commercial carriers often bring in deployable solutions to boost coverage, but the networks are unreliable, insufficient, and do not prioritize EOCs or public safety users in the field.
North Dakota Highway Patrol
Captain Eric Pederson
The North Dakota Highway Patrol has 150 cars on the road across the state at any given time. They use high-definition digital video to record every incident, which is then streamed back to their servers. They also use a variety of data-intensive applications, and their systems are on the verge of becoming paperless. Captain Pederson said radio is still their backup, but they use CAD, which can be spotty depending on the location. The northwest of the state, where the oil boom happened, was one of the first areas to have commercial 4G service. The 4G network worked well for a while, but industry use is so heavy now that the service is slow. The Patrol has a lot of workarounds for these issues, including signal boosters in their cars, but they want priority on a network and better interoperability with other agencies across the state.
North Dakota Department of Emergency Services (DES)
Greg Wilz, Director of Homeland Security Division
Mr. Wilz talked about what he saw as the major needs of North Dakota’s first responders, saying that FirstNet would ideally be like a “Swiss Army knife” that provides whatever tool public safety needs. He said that, of the roughly 15,000 first responders in the state, only about 1,000 of them are full-time. North Dakota will always have the challenge of getting to the scene of incidents in rural parts of the state, but they cannot add technological or informational barriers on top of that, he added. In particular, HAZMAT accidents like the 2013 Casselton train derailment have increased over the past few years and emergency responders have to have good information to make quick decisions. At the state EOC, they focus on what is happening at the scene of an incident and try to figure out what resources local responders need and get them deployed before they are requested.
Many thanks again to North Dakota SPOC Mike Ressler for his leadership in the state; to Travis Durick, who worked so hard on arranging the meeting; and to all the other stakeholders who took time to join the meeting and provide valuable input to our discussions. FirstNet looks forward to continuing to work together with North Dakota.
-Amanda
