When a hurricane bears down or a mass-casualty incident unfolds, the information a city needs to respond almost always exists somewhere. The question is where. Flood-gauge readings sit in one department’s system, ambulance locations in another, road closures in a third.
Integrated operations centers are the solution a growing number of cities are reaching for. The idea is straightforward: bring the data that separate agencies already collect into one shared, real-time picture, so responders see the same situation at the same moment. On a recent IAFCTV Tech Talk Tuesday podcast from the International Association of Fire Chiefs, fire leaders and Chris Callsen, emergency operations lead at Peregrine Technologies, worked through what that looks like in practice, and what still gets in the way.
Why the data gets stuck
Battalion Chief Scott Roseberry of the Garland Fire Department in Texas, who chairs the IAFC, said agencies often wall off their own data without realizing they don’t have to. “I think sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot,” Roseberry said. “We come up with our own policies, procedures, regulations, rules, not knowing that there really isn’t a regulation or law out there prohibiting such sharing of data.”
Real privacy and security standards do apply, including CJIS for criminal justice data and HIPAA for health information. But agencies sometimes read those rules as a blanket ban on sharing, when in practice most of the data can move under the right controls.
Vendors add another layer. Some make it hard for an agency to move or analyze its own records outside their system. They charge extra for data-sharing connections, or block searches in outside tools. Callsen named the problem directly. “They’ve forgotten that the data they’re ingesting into their technologies is actually the customer’s data, not their data,” he said. “So they put up roadblocks to share that data.”
What an integrated operations center does
Done right, an integrated operations center gives a jurisdiction’s separate agencies, police, fire, EMS, and emergency management among them, a common operating picture without merging them into one. Each agency keeps its own data and its own authority over it. The center is a shared, permission-aware view across them, not a single pile everyone owns.
With that picture in place, personnel can see where units are across agencies at once and layer in outside inputs like weather gauges, water-department readings, and traffic flows. When something breaks, they can start triaging in the first few minutes instead of spending them tracking down disconnected data. Those first minutes are the ones that count. Callsen has felt the absence of that firsthand. Working in Austin’s emergency operations center during Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, he watched flood-sensor data change hands three or four times before it reached the room, while shelter availability came in by phone call. “It wasn’t real-time data,” he said. “Think about all of that in real time: the ability to reroute resources, to move resources to a new area, to watch the speed with which flood waters are changing. It’s clear that having that information in real time really should make a difference.”
The same visibility helps after the response, when city officials want to know what an incident cost and how it was handled. Deputy Chief William Broscious of the Charlottesville Fire Department in Virginia said having the numbers ready changes the conversation. “The worst answer to those questions is, ‘I don’t know. Let me get back to you,’” Broscious said. “How impressive is it when you say, ‘Hold on one second,’ and open up your tablet or your cellphone.”
Where AI fits
All that data creates its own risk. A responder who tries to watch everything sees nothing. This is where the fire chiefs saw a role for AI, as a filter on the noise rather than an answer machine.
“So much of that data can become noise,” Roseberry said. “We don’t need to know everything at every point during the incident. We need to know what we need to know when we need to know it. If I fixate on that screen of where everybody’s at the entire time, I lose my situational awareness. I need AI to help point out when something’s about to go wrong.”
The software’s job is to surface the few things that need a human’s attention right now, so people can spend their judgment where it counts. Humans still decide. In an integrated center, that might mean flagging a unit that hasn’t moved in seconds, spotting a pattern across datasets no one had connected, or turning hours of after-incident reporting into minutes.
Making incompatible systems speak
None of this happens without a way to make mismatched systems talk to each other. Peregrine Technologies, an operational intelligence platform, powers real-time operations centers across the U.S. by pulling data from previously siloed sources into one place and building a common language across them. “Where Peregrine really works its magic is the ability to source those different pieces and bring them together in a centralized view,” Callsen said.
In practice, that means harmonizing historical records with live inputs, cleaning and de-duplicating messy legacy data, and keeping the source lineage attached so personnel can gut-check what they are seeing. It runs on permission-based access controls and complies with CJIS and HIPAA, so information reaches only those authorized to see it. And because the records belong to the agencies, not to Peregrine, a shared center leaves each agency in control of its own information. Peregrine’s forward deployed engineers work alongside an agency first to learn its data, operations, and priorities, then build a setup around the questions it cannot currently answer.
For the fire chiefs on the podcast, the largest gain may be the hardest one to measure: the freedom to think bigger once the data finally moves. “Because it’s been so hard for a long time, we haven’t been as imaginative as we could be,” Callsen said. “It’s time we get our imagination back by being able to share our data and think about all the things that we could do.”