Mapping the Future of Emergency Response
A school mapping program goes statewide, fostering collaborations and putting critical information directly in the hands of emergency responders.
WASHINGTON STATE—Almost nine years after the tragic events of April 20, 1999, the name Columbine remains synonymous with school shootings and the broader issue of school safety. For many Americans, the incident at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colorado, was a cultural turning point. Before Columbine, school-based youth violence was a disturbing trend. After, it was a national crisis.
Many of the programs, policies, and budget expenditures that came out of the post-Columbine soul-searching have proven to be controversial, expensive, or ineffective. Zero tolerance weapons policies tied to the federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, for example, have drawn nearly constant criticism for being overreaching. Other efforts, such as school uniforms, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras have also failed to improve school safety according to several research studies.
Not all of the post-Columbine push for greater school safety has been so controversial, however. Comprehensive school safety plans, threat assessments, and emergency preparedness programs have all gained traction as best practices. In Washington state, one program directly influenced by the Columbine tragedy has grown from a small, county-level effort to a statewide mandate to a national award-winning model of collaboration.
Learning From Mistakes
Much of the post-Columbine media attention and public criticism focused on the chaotic nature of the Jefferson County, Colorado, emergency response effort. Why did it take SWAT teams nearly a full hour to enter the school after the initial reports of gunfire? Why did it take another two hours to reach some of the teachers and students who were hiding throughout the school, including one teacher who was bleeding to death? Why was the emergency response effort so obviously disorganized? In one widely reported example, Lieutenant Terry Manwaring of the Jefferson County SWAT team had to ask four students to make him a hastily drawn map of the school’s floor plan.
Sheriff John Stone, along with others involved in the Columbine emergency response effort, did not hide from the criticism. In the months following the shooting, Jefferson County first responders met frequently with federal officials and others to talk openly about the difficult lessons they had learned. One such meeting included a Pierce County, Washington, contingent led by Steve Bailey, director of the county’s Department of Emergency Management, along with representatives from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. What they heard was a cautionary tale that included an overwhelmed 911 dispatch center; an uncoordinated effort among police, fire, SWAT, and other first responders from several counties; the difficulty of gathering basic, but critical information such as the school’s floor plan; and an inability to deal with the crowd of media and concerned parents that swarmed to the scene.
Upon its return home, the Pierce County group drew up a list of these problems, compared them to existing policies, and set about finding solutions. Working with the county’s Information Technology department—including Linda Gerull, manager of Geographic Information Services, in particular—the county focused on creating a low-cost, easy-to-use, accessible database of emergency response information. The end result was all that and more.
Called the Pierce Responder system, the program was a groundbreaking combination of a wireless Internet database accessed with laptop computers. Besides an actual digital map of each school’s floor plan, this “school map” included building photos, satellite aerial photos, utility shut-offs, emergency contact numbers, evacuation routes, and other data made directly available to first responders.
By the end of 2000 the program was not only functional, it had already won the Exemplary Systems in Government Award, given by the Urban & Regional Information Systems Association in Orlando, Florida, and been hailed as the first program of its kind in the nation.
Scaling It Up
In 2000, one of the Pierce County Sheriff’s detectives that went to Columbine High School along with the county representatives founded Prepared Response, Inc. (PRI) with several other Puget Sound investors. In 2001, the county transferred rights to that company, Prepared Response Inc. and continues to receive a percentage of sales revenues. PRI commercialized and modified the original system and began marketing it nationwide as the Rapid Responder® Crisis Management System.
Given that Tacoma, the Pierce County seat, is midway between Seattle and the state capitol in Olympia, it was only a matter of time before others took notice of what is now called Rapid Responder. One of the first to do so was State Representative John Lovick, whose 31 years of service in the state patrol gave him a unique perspective on the importance of emergency preparedness. Working with the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC), Lovick, along with State Senator Joe Zarelli, helped push the idea of taking Rapid Responder statewide.
Also in 2001, WASPC received funding from the Washington State Legislature to administer a pilot of the program in eight counties. They released a request for proposals and chose PRI and its Rapid Responder system.
A Model of Collaboration
In Washington, it’s easy to take WASPC for granted. The organization has been around since the 1960s and is still the only one of its kind in the United States—a nonprofit law enforcement executive association with representatives from every type of jurisdiction and every part of the state, from small town police forces to county sheriff’s departments to the state patrol.
“In law enforcement, cities and counties are typically very different in the ways they operate,” says Tom Corzine, deputy director of WASPC. “And then the state patrol also has its own way of doing things. We’re unique in the way we bring all of them together in one organization to promote legislative agendas, communicate collectively, and move forward with efforts that help everyone in the state.”
From its beginnings in Pierce County, WASPC recognized the school mapping project as just such an effort. Without WASPC’s experience and network of relationships it’s difficult to imagine the project spreading from a single county to the entire state, an effort that began in earnest in September 2003 when the state legislature passed a bill providing $5 million to map all 460-plus high schools in the state. That legislation formally created the Washington State School Mapping and Emergency Preparedness Program, which followed the blueprint of the 2001 pilot project: administered by WASPC, contracted to PRI, and using Rapid Responder technology as its core. That technology was adapted specifically for the state and named the Critical Incident Planning and Mapping System (CIPMS).
According to Joe Hawe, manager of the Tactical Operations Support Department at WASPC and director of the state mapping program, the mapping of all state public high schools was completed in December 2005. While it was under way, the Washington legislature passed another bill, sponsored by Representative Lovick, that significantly expanded the scope of the program by requiring the mapping of all “critical infrastructure” public buildings in the state. In addition, the legislature has expanded the school mapping program to include all elementary and middle schools. “We have about 70 percent of the K–12 public schools in the state tactically mapped at this time,” says Hawe. “We should have the entire K–12 program completed by December 2008.”
More Than a Map
Although it’s typically referred to as the “state mapping project,” the Washington State School Mapping and Emergency Preparedness Program is actually much more than a map or an Internet-based collection of data. Like the original Pierce Responder program, it also includes a pre-planning tactical response process, and relies on collaboration between school personnel and first responder agencies. “It’s an entire system,” says Hawe, “and the mapping is just a piece of that system. The process of mapping acts as a focal point to bring all of the first responder community together with the facility managers—whether that’s a school building or a public building—to actually talk about how to protect that facility and how to respond to an incident. The collaboration is the biggest piece of the program.”
Beginning with the pre-planning meetings, PRI’s professional services team facilitates the discussion between school officials—usually a mix of district and building administrators—and representatives from fire, police, the sheriff’s department, and others. According to Gary Sabol, public relations manager for Prepared Response, “It’s a chance to foster dialogue and build relationships. It allows each agency to talk about its concerns, its priorities, and the best way to collaborate and coordinate their response to a wide variety of emergency situations.”
The situations they consider typically include lockdowns, school shootings, fires, earthquakes, hazardous materials spills, bomb threats, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other crises specific to each school’s immediate surroundings. It’s in these meetings that evacuation procedures, off-site staging areas, and incident command protocols are agreed upon. “Basically what we’re doing is taking an all-hazards approach and creating a template for any possibility,” says Sabol. “We’re trying to avoid a situation like Columbine where first responders arrive at the scene and scramble around trying to find information and decide what needs to happen. That should all be planned ahead of time and all of that information should be available in one place to any emergency responder that needs it.”
After the pre-planning is complete, a PRI team goes to each school to take digital images, collect data, and build the actual “map” of the school. From there, all the data are uploaded, each person with access to the database is trained, and the system is up and ready to use. At a school in Spokane, that happened just in time.
A Real-World Test
At 11:30 a.m. on September 22, 2003, Lewis & Clark High School’s first lunch period had just begun. Many of the 2,000-plus students were eating their lunch in the hallways—a tradition at the school. Few students heard it, but in a third-floor science classroom a distraught 16-year-old student pulled a 9mm pistol from his pocket, demanded that the teacher and three fellow students leave the room, and fired a shot into a cabinet. The teacher immediately rushed to the office where then–Principal Jon Swett and other administrators made the decision to activate the fire alarms to evacuate the school, rather than go into lockdown. “We made that decision based on the fact that so many students were already at lunch and in the hallways,” says Swett. “And that the shooter himself was holed up in a classroom rather than moving throughout the school. We thought it was best to get the students out and away from the area.”
Only days before, Lewis & Clark had been the first school in the district to complete the mapping process. It proved invaluable. Police arrived on the scene within minutes, set up a makeshift command center, and accessed the database. Working with Swett, Joe Madsen, the district’s director of school safety, and others, the police quickly gathered information about the student and the facility. “They were able to look at a diagram of the building and understand where the student was,” says Madsen. “Not only where he was in the school, but where that was in the context of the school grounds and the city. With the digital photographs they were able to determine that his line of sight was directly on to the field where we had evacuated the students, as well as right onto Interstate 90, which runs next to the school.”
Using that information and drawing on the tactical response plan, the district’s transportation department evacuated all of the 2,000-plus students away from the school grounds to a predetermined staging location. The city transportation department also used information in the database to close off all routes that led to the point on I-90 that was in the shooter’s line of sight. Within 20 minutes all students had been evacuated, roads had been closed, and the shooter had been isolated.
In the end, the student provoked the SWAT team, was wounded, and rushed to the hospital where he survived. But, as Madsen says, “By the time that happened none of the students were even around to hear it or see it. They were several miles away being reunited with their parents. As an emergency response it was a tremendous success, and a lot of that was because of Rapid Responder.”
The Lewis & Clark incident did much to spread the word about the school mapping program. Some feel that the smooth resolution of the incident directly led to the legislature’s expansion of the program. And its reputation continues to grow. In April, Prepared Response was awarded a $7 million federal grant to install the Rapid Responder system in 1,000 schools in South Carolina, Texas, Arizona, and Idaho, as well as the remaining schools in Washington. To date, the system has been used in 11 different states.
In September, Washington’s CIPMS program received the 2007 Noblis Innovations Award in Homeland Security, a prestigious honor given by the Noblis organization and the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The awards panel, including a former director of the FBI and the former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, praised the program for much more than its technological innovations, says Corzine. “They really pointed to the collaboration of law enforcement, Pierce County officials, WASPC, the governor, the Washington State Legislature, as well as all of the school districts, fire departments, and others that worked to make it happen.”
School shootings, natural disasters, and other emergencies continue to make headlines, and emergency response efforts, in many cases, continue to fall short of expectations. But in Washington, the school mapping project has shown how a diverse group of organizations can work together to make everyone safer. 