Davao City puts up RP’s first public-emergency center
by Manuel T. Cayon
August 8, 2010
Business Mirror Online Space (
www.businessmirror.com.ph)
Across the main wall inside the new public safety command center building here is an initial set of 16 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras monitoring 65 street intersections and the Davao International Airport.
Upstairs is the so-called war-room where disaster officials assess the data coming in every few minutes and map out responses to cataclysmic events such as flashflood, disease outbreak, crime and terrorism.
Outside are the more than 1,000 police personnel equipped with new mobile cars, motorcycles and bicycles.
The city has its own version of the world-famed 911 Emergency Response with its 18 ambulances outfitted with lifesaving gadgets, four rubber boats, three fiberglass boats, two amphibious all-terrain vehicles and modern equipment to respond to vehicular and structural accidents.
At the headlands of four major river basins are river water trackers backed by standalone weather-station gadgets and automatic weather-station gadgets attached to the cellular-phone towers of Smart Communications, tapped to relay emergency mobile messages to the command center.
At a budget of P704 million, this city mounted the country’s first public safety and disaster-management and operations center, backed by a trained, equipped and experienced emergency-response unit, designated to coordinate police, traffic, health, social and emergency services, as well as disaster-management agencies in disaster and other emergency situations.
The public safety command center, built at the compound of the former public market in the SIR, New Matina near downtown, was part of the third phase of the traffic-signalization program of the city and was designed and constructed by Los Angeles, the US-based Abratique and Associate Inc.
The traffic network built sometime in 2006 was patterned after the US system that operates electronically and aided by road sensors. The second phase was the expanded coverage of the traffic-signal system.
The setup inside the command center approximates the coordination system used in disaster nerve centers in developed countries, such as the Brevard Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in Brevard County, Space Coast, Florida, in the US. This center “uses telephone, television and the Emergency Services of the County Sheriff, the City Police and the Fire Departments to provide coordinated management of all services for cataclysmic events such as hurricanes, floods and terrorism,” said a briefer from the Brevard EOC.
Aside from putting up the nerve center, the third phase includes the acquisition of more vehicles and equipment to respond to natural disasters, made more urgent with the helplessness of disaster agencies in the national capital and Luzon to respond to distressed persons while emergency help was needed the most.
The police acquired 10 new mobile vans on top of the more than 20 vans. The emergency-response system, or 911 for short, acquired 11 new ambulances equipped with the latest automatic external defibrillator, a lifesaving apparatus that applies electrical impulses to the heart and manned by paramedics; new all-terrain vehicles; fiberglass boats; and four rubber boats.
Its other fleet of vehicles includes fire trucks with a pumper, a device to help pump water from the hydrants to the trucks; three rescue vehicles—with one mounted with rescue equipment and the other two are rescue vans.
Its motor boats have scuba-diving equipment, which are top-of-the-line products of Zodiac, the company that provides the needs of the US Navy Seals. Scuba divers are also always placed on standby.
The 911 system is also equipped for mountain rescue and road accidents, with rappelling equipment for mountain and building rescue, and spreaders and pneumatic cutters for vehicle and other road accidents.
The 911 Emergency Hotline here is only the third place in the world to be operating outside the US and Canada. The 911 call-in system operates through the accurate tracking system used by the Aboitiz-owned Davao Light and Power Co., which provided the software similar to its tracking system to locate individual household consumers and electric posts.
What comes next, Monsanto said, is putting up “coordinated land or mobile-phone lines” in barangays, trainings and installing systematic evacuation systems in the disaster-prone areas.”
He said the city plans to refine the communication system between them and the police to ensure that the CCTV cameras would be used “to preempt the commission of crimes rather than become mere video recording of what had happened.”
The command center, to be headed by retired Col. Mario Verner Monsanto, the head of the 911, was covered by Executive Order 12, issued by Mayor Sara Z. Duterte.
“This is actually the dream of Mayor [Rodrigo, Sara’s father] Duterte, who has been working on this because he wants the residents of this city protected from terrorism, as well as natural disasters,” she said during the blessing and opening of the command center on July 28.
Smart Communication Inc. (Smart) and Ateneo de Davao University both helped in the area of weather-and-flood tracking. Smart provides access to its short message system and its disaster-management experience culled from its response to the two airplane crashes in Cagayan de Oro and in Samal, Davao del Norte, in the last decade.
Ateneo de Davao University provides the software and the gadget for river water tracking and the small box-like and stand-alone weather-station gadget, which it won during the electronic competition sponsored by Smart. The school submitted the gadget as a search-and-rescue equipment.
In the area of communication and disaster tracking, Mon Isberto, public affairs group head of Smart, said, “The city has the three basic requirements for us to come in and help install the disaster-management system that is well-suited for a mobile-phone network.”
First, he said, “The city requested us to come in. That means that this was demand-driven, not something that we offered and persuaded people to adapt.” Second, there was the need “to respond to the flood”; and third, “the city has the means, the resources and the capability to respond to the data that would be fed to the command center.”
thanks for opening this.
