Emergency Operations Centers: Photo gallery
Balancing my coffee cup and briefcase in one hand, I slide my badge free from the lanyard with the other. I hold the badge up to the scanner, pausing for a moment until I hear the familiar pop of the door’s lock. The blue and red overhead lights of the room spill out of the door and into the hallway as the door opens, along with the mix of piano runs and drum beats of Pete Rock’s Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics, the instrumental album.
Before me, two rows of desks are oriented to face several large displays. I take a seat at my desk in the back row and scan the displays. One shows live camera feeds, another has two weather radars, one for our local radar and another live satellite picture of a tropical system we’re monitoring. A third display has a draft document my colleagues are working on, and a fourth shows a quad-display of different news networks’ coverage of the same event, something political that we’re trying to ignore. Above the displays reads a time bar showing the times in Hawaii, Washington, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. Around the room, various laminated maps and whiteboards are marked with current projects we’re tracking and notes regarding departures from our operational protocols.
Pete Rock’s “Fakin Jax” is occasionally interrupted by radio chatter. With each chirp of the radio, everyone in the room cocks their head to listen. A few clicks of the mouse confirm that the information passed via radio was not new information. Time marches on.
Such is life inside the Operations Center. Today is a “steady state” day, or a day where there’s nothing to respond to. Some military operations centers refer to this as peacetime. Some humanitarian emergency management organizations like to call it “blue skies.” On days like today, there are few decisions to be made and most of our time is occupied with administrative work and monitoring our jurisdiction via the feeds that come into this room.
Things are calm. Boring, almost.
In an instant, though, that could all change. The prospect of a no-notice event constantly tugs at the collective attention of the team. The number of events or situations that could cause a significant disruption are limited only by one’s imagination. Similarly, the coordination and response to complex emergency situations often requires the most important decisions be made immediately following the onset and recognition of an emergency. When things shift from steady-state-mode to response-mode, those in the room must make the best decisions based on their understanding of available information, the result of constant situational awareness and assessment.
Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) are where this all takes place, in an emergency management context. Not all EOCs are alike. In fact, very few of them are similar in any respect aside from their role as the information hub throughout the phases of emergency management. Some cater to hosts of different agencies and liaisons. Some give the same individual as many hats as can be worn at one time. Some EOCs separate tasks and teams by function while others offer an open forum for collaboration where egos are expected to be checked at the door.
The physical spaces themselves are equally varied. EOCs with high-level administrative support and a “whatever it takes” approach to funding are integrated with state of the art communications, monitoring, and analysis infrastructure, while other EOCs are, on their best days, simply spaces where the right people can meet and talk about the problems at hand.
These are some of those spaces:
