Episode 230: Expanding Emergency Response: FirstNet’s Marine Division with Fred Scalera

Published 2024-07-03

Episode notes

How does AT&T's new Marine Division enhance response capabilities in water-based environments?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

Innovative solutions for emergency communications

How FirstNet is enhancing response capabilities for water-based emergencies

How are FirstNet and AT&T collaborating?

Find out from Fred Scalera - Director of Program Management and the Response Operations Group (ROG) for the FirstNet Program at AT&T.

Fred talks about the group's role in providing emergency communications and support to public safety agencies. He shares examples of ROG's innovative solutions and the collaboration with FirstNet and AT&T to expand capabilities, including the launch of a Marine Division for water-based emergencies.

Fred also emphasizes the importance of finding solutions to overcome obstacles and effectively support public safety.

So click play now to hear what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

0:00 Kevin's intro at FDIC 2024
0:38 Fred's role in how FirstNet was born
1:29 Building the Response Operations Group
7:58 Figure it out: the ROG mindset
8:38 Deploying to Maui and other disasters
12:12 How agencies get involved
14:52 Requesting ROG support through FirstNet Central
17:04 What keeps Fred up at night
19:20 Fred's parting thoughts
20:08 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is the Response Operations Group and when did it start?

Fred Scalera says the Response Operations Group, or ROG team, started in April 2018 when FirstNet went live with deployables. The team handles emergencies, planned events, national security events, and anything where public safety needs assistance. Examples Fred gives include what he calls the big game and Formula One races.

Hear it at 0:38

How many deployables does FirstNet have now?

Fred Scalera explains that the FirstNet contract started with 72 deployables, then the FirstNet authority bought another 10 for a total of 82. The team quickly learned that number was not enough, so they developed additional solutions like in-building equipment, Go Reds, cell booster pros, and HPUE devices.

Hear it at 1:58

What is HPUE and how does it help first responders?

Fred Scalera describes HPUE as high-powered user-end equipment licensed to operate at 1.5 watts, able to connect to cell sites up to 13 miles away and supply Wi-Fi on the spot. He gives an example of a search and rescue in a state park with no tower coverage where they plugged a drone into the HPUE and were able to share live video.

Hear it at 1:58

How can agencies request FirstNet deployable equipment?

Fred Scalera says 90 percent of requests now come through FirstNet Central, where administrators can log in and submit requests electronically without waiting on an 800 number or answering repetitive questions. Multiple requests can be submitted at once. The 800 number is still available if needed.

Hear it at 15:22

What is FirstNet doing to improve hurricane and flood response?

Fred Scalera says AT&T and FirstNet have built a Marine division with boats, a landing craft like the military uses, and a hydro tech that can travel on land, water, and sea. They are now the only carrier with these assets to respond to hurricanes, storms, and urban flooding.

Hear it at 17:18

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 230 transcript

Expanding Emergency Response: FirstNet’s Marine Division with Fred Scalera

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Fred Scalera

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to our Smart Firefighting podcast miniseries hosted at FDIC 2024. You will hear some stories from XPRIZE, AT&T FirstNet, and some other first responders. There are some great insights on wildfire technologies, connectivity during first responder operations, health and wellness, and much more. Enjoy the show. All right, episode two of our mini FDIC miniseries alongside Fred Scalera with FirstNet built with AT&T. Fred, how you doing?

[0:33] Fred Scalera: Good. Thanks, Kevin. How are you?

[0:36] Kevin Sofen: I'm doing quite well. So what brings you to Indianapolis here?

[0:38] Fred Scalera: So a long story how we got here, but I was really a part of how FirstNet was born. Actually was involved in the legislation, the spectrum, built the early builder project for when I was on Homeland Security for FirstNet and actually input things into the RFP that all of the companies bid and AT&T was awarded. And I was actually honored the day the contract was signed in the morning, I was the first outside employee brought on to start building our response operations. Wasn't known as that then, but it's known as the ROG team now, the Response Operations Group. We handle emergencies, planned events, national security events, anything that might be occurring where public safety needs assistance For an example, we call it the big game, the Formula One races, all those national security events. My team coordinates and works and runs on all of those events.

[1:29] Kevin Sofen: I love it. And Ryan just, Ryan Fields-Spack, who was just on the podcast here earlier, spoke a lot about the foundation of FirstNet, why it was started, what's FirstNet working on, and sort of the reinvestment strategy and everything. But on your shirt, and you just mentioned this response operation group, ROG, I want to double-click into that a bit more. Kind of, you mentioned these specific events, but what does that operationally look like? And is it sort of ground assets? Is it, you know, additional networks? Is it like, and then sort of, how is it activated? What's it look like? Tell me a little bit, tell me everything.

[1:58] Fred Scalera: I love talking about that. We went live April of 2018 was the time we had to be live with all our deployables and things to meet the contract with the person at authority. About a month in, we got a request. There was a federal officer shot in the face in Chicago, brought into a hospital and they didn't have coverage. We got a deployable request, our first ever request. Nobody knew me on the call. I didn't know anybody on the call. It was myself, Ryan Fields, Ryan Burchnell, the three of us on, and we're discussing it. And the regular RAN team says, well, we can't do anything. I said, no, we are. We're gonna put the SAC cult up. We're gonna take a singular panel, and we're gonna saturate the hell out of that building. The funny story is there's an AVP on the call. Calls up my VP, Jim Bugel. Says, you know this guy, Fred Scalera? He goes, yeah, you know what he wants us to do? And Jim goes, we do that now. And that was the start of the operations, knowing that we didn't just need to do a SAC hold. We need to respond to public safety. We needed to have different ways to go out and triage and make plans. So from there, the ROG team started expanding. We built a triage process. And all we had for the first year or two was a SAC hold. Well, quickly we identified SAC holds not perfect for everything. We need different ways. We nipped deep for an equipment. So I, just like when I did the early builder project, I started saying, well, we need to build this and I would build it. And actually they would go over the product and became a product such as an MBK. Then we have GoReds, the do building extension. We took that and make that a kidded process with tripods and equipment. It's now a product we sell. So a lot of things that ROG's even developed are things that we sell today, but give us a better response. So the first net contract was 72 deployables, 72 deployables. We fastly learned we need more than 72. We went to the first net authority, they bought another 10. We had 82 deployables, but it still wasn't solving an in-building solution. We'd send a SAC holdout for an in-building solution. That wasn't practical. So we created equipment for in-building such as the Go Red. We created cell booster pros, all different types of solutions that we could deploy. So we built HPUE, high-powered user-end equipment. We're the only ones licensed to do that. So, you know, I'm kind of in the older phase here, carrying the bag phone, the car phone, three watts. Our phones are like 0.02 watts now. We're licensed to go up to three, but our HPUE is at 1.5 watts, and we can connect up to cell sites up to 13 miles away. So, and supply Wi-Fi on the spot, rapidly, quickly. And we also sell that and gets installed on patrol cars, fire trucks, agencies have purchased it. And the way I like to explain the HPUE is, I was down in Orange County, Florida, and was doing a hurricane preparedness. And the sheriff said, hey, I want you to talk to my drone guy. I said, sure. So they tried to explain, they were doing a search in a state park. Now guess what you can't build in state parks, towers. There's always a lack of coverage. So he said, we were trying to share a drone out, doing search and rescue. and we couldn't share any drone. I said, let's go out tomorrow, we'll deploy an HPUE and let's plug the drone into it. Well, sure enough, we went out, brought the box right where they were, plugged in the drone, and we shared that information out live, right? So with the ROG team, we have to come up with ways that we're gonna make it work for public safety. So we take components, we build things. We went up to, we have the HPUEs, I mean, excuse me, the Megago's, the Subbooster Pros. So we're up in Alaska, we took a mini CRD and we'll talk about them in a minute. We took that up there, it was up there on a plane and a boat and a car within 14 hours and we sit on the roof of the building and we have all this stuff fully operational inside the ROG team and we sell this equipment also, I'll come back to that. But we put it on the roof and it was live. Well, we had a problem, we only had one unit get up there. They couldn't do flight missions with helicopters or planes. They couldn't download flight plans. So we took a LEO panel, satellite panel, we took a cell booster probe that's made for in-building, we overrode the GPS, we made it live, and we were able to feed, let them do the download what they needed to do the emergency flights with planes and helicopters. Was that a product? No. Did we make it work? Yes. That's the goal of the ROG team. The ROG team is all prior members, military, police, fire, as all public safety, all outside hires into AT&T and FirstNet because we wanted to make sure the people we send to the field know what we need to do for public safety. Then we built vehicles, communications vehicles. We have those that we can spawn out. We work and live out of those trucks for three days going into a hurricane. It's got water, it's got food, microwave, bed. So we're sustainable out in the emergency. That was another piece. Then we wound up with the mini CRD that we also have here on the show floor behind you. That was our next evolution. It's a small cell site. We sell them as co-amps. Hundreds of agencies have purchased them on them to deploy them on their own rapidly, but we have also those internally in our fleet that we can surge in for a hurricane, surge into areas. We have to do hot standby sometimes at different locations for security events and all. We plug it in, leave it there, and it's ready to go. Then we've launched the mini CRD, which is another whole tool for us that travels in two suitcases, basically. We can take it on a plane, ship it where we need to ship it, set it up. So we've been advancing this equipment as ROG has been building the plan for emergencies, working with FirstNet and AT&T product, we have now made these products that are called customer-owned and managed right after the customer level. So the ROG team has really been like the cultivator of, what do we do? How do we do it? How do we change the business? And I think that's been a main goal of how we've supported public safety.

[7:58] Kevin Sofen: Well, the ROG team reminds me a lot of a message that my family lives by. We have this phrase called F-I-O, figure it out. And oftentimes first responders are faced with just a wide range of obstacles. And sometimes you need these different tools and it can't be just black and white, super rigid. You gotta figure it out. And it seems like this has been a sort of a ingrained into the ethos of ROG. And I would love to have you kind of dive into a bit more of this mindset of figuring it out for first responders. What does it mean for firefighters? whether you're a small, medium, large fire department, rural, urban, tell me about kind of, again, I don't wanna hear about the network, I wanna hear about what is it, I'm a first responder, I wake up, and this helps me because why?

[8:38] Fred Scalera: So I'll give you a great story. So we responded to Maui, and we deployed a lot of equipment, and we worked with a lot of federal agencies, FEMA, USAR teams, supplying equipment, getting things moved, and we just did a panel on Maui at the IWCA event, of myself, the first net authority, one of my section chiefs, and the urban search and rescue lead, the comm L from California. And I think one of the best statements that we can show how we support public safety is he turned to the audience and said, listen, I have learned about ROG. And the first thing we knew you arrive on scene is you find that ROG section chief cause he's gonna make something work. He's gonna figure it out. He's gonna get you a solution. We're gonna get parts shipped in. We're gonna build what you need and we're gonna get you that communications. And not only that, but we're gonna coordinate with your agency. So one of the things we learned during a tornado, the ROG team's on site, and they said, listen, we have to go out, it was in Kentucky, and we're gonna go way away from the network. We need to bring communications with us. We actually, first time ever, we took a driver from NDR and a section chief from ROG that traveled for three days out with the military, eating MREs and things like that in the field. The guy that just came on with our response team was in the military and he said, I'll go. And we sent a section chief with him and they traveled first time. right where they needed to go. So I'm a Katrina responder, a 9-11 responder. We go paint the orange thing on the building. We have to make the notations for it. Now, once they have network, they use the phone. It's GPS, they send it in. There's no writing it on paper, going back in, figuring out. The information's live. And those are the things that were changing the way they work. We supply the network, not just for this area, but where they need to do the search and rescue. We were with another National Guard at another emergency, And we would set up equipment today and they'd use the network. They did search and rescue. They marked the buildings. And when they went and slept at night, we moved the equipment to where they were gonna search the next day. So when they got there the next day, that equipment was waiting for them. They were able to do the search, do the tracking. And no more writing things on paper doing that. Take a picture, database it, connect it. Those are all things, as we make that work better for public safety, whether it's a federal, local, state, We protect the consumers and the citizens as well, because the more communications we have, listen, 9-11, no communications. And I can go into the whole failure on what we had to do on that date as a responder without communications. The best story on how we do help public safety, during COVID, New York City, brings in 300 ambulance around the country, Colorado, Texas. Well, they each come with their own what? Radio. Do that radios talk to each other? No, they don't. We deployed a device to every ambulance with a push-to-talk button so they could communicate. We set up a dispatch center in Fort Totten and they had the app to dispatch on. So they were dispatched electronically, had a push-to-talk app. They seamlessly worked in the city like they were in the city from the beginning. That's the change. But ROG, how it figures it out, creates it. And our team in the field, that's what they do. They meet with you, they educate you, They act as one of you, they know what it takes to save a person, to fight the fire, to, you know, the plane explosion up in Alaska. We were on scene making changes, what they needed to do in building coverage. Those are things that truly make us different between us and the others.

[12:12] Kevin Sofen: I love it, and thank you for painting that context in terms of how it's operational and how it benefits first responders, and I wanna maybe now switch it to the industry side and partner side, and there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are part of this community, and just people trying to take something that works maybe in a different industry and apply it to public safety, but also kind of build on the back of FirstNet, built with AT&T as well as what the ROG group is doing. Any sort of words of wisdom or ideas in terms of different partners that are either creating data, displaying data, moving data, how can they work with the network in a way that maybe they haven't thought of? What are some steps or ideas on how to get involved?

[12:49] Fred Scalera: Well, it changes across the country, especially when you talk about the fire service and the EMS service, how many career, how many volunteer, right? There's still, you know, no matter which way you wanna look at it, there's affordability, but we have built more solutions and applications inside of FirstNet than any organization ever did. The apps in FirstNet, whether it be, you know, communications for push to talk, whether it be a tracking app, whether it's the Z-axis right above grade, right? So if we could track them where they are and an officer or a person gets trapped, we can identify where they are. Well, all of it ties together, but the cities and the people, let's say, have a UASI funding and all, are able to do this much more readily. And when you get to the more rural areas, they don't have the technology. But when we go there for the emergency, we bring that technology with us that they can use for the emergency, right? When you come on our comms vehicle, spare devices, spare equipment, applications, push the talk devices that they might have regularly, we also still bring that to the emergency. So they don't have to own it all the time, but when they hit the emergency, they need it, we show up and also supply it. And by the way, everything we do is no cost, right? That's part of the contract to federal government. Everything we need to do to support public safety and respond is at no cost to the consumer. So we bring those things to the smaller agencies. We have different types of SAC holds, big ones and we have what's called the Jersey Net, which was the pilot built out of New Jersey for the first net authority. and we had a big event up in Oregon. And we have a subscriber paid, we have all sorts of agency paid, but subscriber paid. Most volunteered departments, each firefighter has a first-knit phone, but it's his own personal one. He can have that, it's allowed. So it was a 15-man department, single fire engine. The big trucks couldn't get through. The smaller trailer got through, deployed. And that department actually wrote us a card signed by all of those firefighters saying we never thought we'd see this and not only that big cities would see it. We're there for that little guy, to the big city, supporting in whatever way we can.

[14:52] Kevin Sofen: I love it. And that's why we're here today. And I mean, in the scene behind me, you'd mentioned that response vehicle as well, and just kind of how it's sort of made available. I'm kind of curious from not only the network, but kind of these different devices that are deployed. Is it sort of like, hey, if you're a first net built AT&T customer or user, it's sort of in these sort of unplanned events, it's like call Fred and Fred's team will show up, or like how is it mobilized and how does that kind of go into action?

[15:22] Fred Scalera: So that's a great way. So when FirstNet launched, we launched with a 800 number. Well, we suddenly found out that, you know, when you kind of call the 800 number, what's your name? What's your address? What's your phone number? What's your fan number? What's your, well, it took a lot of time and then it had to all be entered and then it would be reentered in a computer to get to rock. Couple of years ago, we spent a lot of money internally, ATT FirstNet to build FirstNet Central. And in FirstNet Central now you could log in and you'll see how to request the deployable. When you log in as town X, I'll just use, it loads who you are, what you are. You don't have to answer all those questions and you fill it out. You're not hanging on an 800 number. You're not waiting to say, okay, we're busy. They instantly come in, 90% of our responses now come in through FirstNet Central electronically. We get them faster, we get better information, and it's all, again, as part of FirstNet. So anybody on FirstNet, as administrators or uplift people, we tell everybody, make sure you have more than one person, because if you only give one person credentials, he's off. But they do that, but 90% of that now, we have one firefighter chief that called in, he says, he needed four deployals, so he calls once, they go, okay, you have to call back in for the second one. What, you have to call? So now with FirstNet Central, he can put one, two, I could put six requests in seamlessly all at one time through FirstNet Central. So we have taken, and again, it came from ROG, we saw the problem, we identified it, and AT&T FirstNet funded building that process, which works very successfully today. So the request process can be done off your phone, can be done off your iPad, can be done off your computer. You still could call the 800 if that's the bottom line, you only have a phone and you can't do anything else, but 90% of the requests now are through FirstNet Central.

[17:04] Kevin Sofen: I love it. And kind of two other final questions I wanna ask to close out here is, what's something that keeps Fred up at night? And what's something that you're working on as maybe a concern of that you're worried? And on the flip side, I also wanna hear, what are you most excited about and looking forward to?

[17:18] Fred Scalera: So my team works 24-7 and I'm a 24-7 guy. My phone, I sleep with my phone. You can call my phone from internally, not externally, right? So the bell rings, there's a problem with the network. I know about it instantly. But what keeps me up is, there's so much going on in the world and we're doing different things. How are we gonna prepare to cover much more area, much more rapidly? We're dealing with more protests than we ever dealt with. We're dealing with cyber attacks. So we get cyber attacks that are at hospitals that are on first net, right? But they have a cyber attack. Well, that's not really a first net problem, but we go in to get them live. We bring in devices to put wifi in every floor. We create a way that they use their phones and call out. So those things keep changing. How do we get ahead of it? How do we determine it? But those things are always on my mind. I wake up making notes on my phone stating, hey, what are we gonna do if we solve this one? Those are the things that kind of keep it up. But I really like to talk about another innovation. So we have just launched a Marine division under AT&T, which spent a lot of money. So back during the hurricane in Florida, Sanibel Island, the bridge was out. There was another island, bridge is out, no communications. We took the CRDs and we had this hydro tech, you might've seen the videos on a lot of different news channels. And we built a hydro tech that goes land, water and sea. Well, we found out when you're going out in the open water, not just in a lake or river, with the wind against you and the tide coming in, we were going, but we weren't getting there that fast. We just built a LCT, a landing craft like the military, as the thing drops down, we drive our trucks and equipment off of it. We're now the only carrier that we have boats, we have a landing craft, we have a hydro tech. Those are great things. And that's the bigger picture under AT&T. AT&T funded that. FirstNet gets access to it, but that's the way we wanna respond now for hurricanes and storms. We have to think better. Flooding's more in cities, in streets. We need to be able to get through the flooded streets, get to the equipment, and we with AT&T at FirstNet are doing that.

[19:20] Kevin Sofen: I love it. And kind of final things that I would love to hear from you of maybe sort of any sort of parting thoughts, words of wisdom, favorite quote, even a challenge, or really anything sort of you could leave us with here today.

[19:33] Fred Scalera: So that's a difficult statement because I think about a lot of different things in doing that, but here's what I always state. If we can't supply public safety with communications, failure occurs that affects the citizens. As long as we can bring that communications and fill that gap with proper communications, we can save lives.

[19:53] Kevin Sofen: Well said. And Fred, I love it. ROG, Response Operation Group, and particularly my favorite phrase, FIO, figuring it out. And I really admire the work you're doing and look forward to staying in touch and seeing how ROG continues to make an impact across the country.

[20:06] Fred Scalera: Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it very much.

[20:08] Kevin Sofen: Thanks, Fred. Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting podcast today. If you enjoyed what you heard and got any value, please drop us a rating, leave us a comment or reach out to us on social media. Have a great day and together we can advance the future of smart firefighting.