London Fire Brigade

Overview

London Fire Brigade (LFB) is the busiest fire and rescue service in the country, one of the world’s largest fire and rescue services. With over 5,000 employees, LFB focuses on protecting people and property from fire within the 1,587 square kilometres of Greater London. They respond to over a quarter of a million calls for help each year and serve a population of over 9 million Londoners.

Challenge

The Brigade were on a journey to embrace new technology to better assist them in their role and enhance situational awareness. They wanted to be able to instantly share the visual information they had access to with all control staff. The Brigade previously had a video wall to display visual updates to the control team, however this was installed roughly 8 years ago. When it was installed, it was a state-of-the-art installation, however over recent years, support needs have become more frequent, with some parts becoming obsolete as the technology became outdated.

Joanne Smith, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of London Fire Brigades Control room, said “Finding a suitable solution was really important to us. This role has a high level of responsibility, and it has a risk-critical element as well, because we serve the capital. And it is vital that we have the most up-to-date and relevant information to provide to our control officers to make decisions.”

Solution

SCC worked with LFB to identify the best solution to replace the obsolete video wall and extend the value of the technology, to further improve situational awareness in the control room. SCC installed a state-of-the-art LED screen and an additional 12 large, wall-mounted monitors around the control room. This allows individual screens to be used to display different feeds including CCTV, Heli telly, drone footage, Good Sam feeds and breaking news stories simultaneously. This enables the control team to keep an overview of incidents in our areas and our resources. To achieve the multiple feeds, SCC proposed creating a dedicated video network, which allows a lot of flexibility with the solution, allowing managers in the control room to route different sources to different screens as their requirements change.

Benefit

The AV solution provides several benefits to LFB staff to support incident management, including the ability to send video footage to operational staff at the scene of an incident to inform their situational awareness. In turn, the incident commanders on scene can also send footage back to the control room, allowing the control team to visualise it and send more resources to support an incident if required.

The solution also enables a caller who dials 999 to stream video footage live into the control room, allowing control commanders to quickly make decisions around resourcing incident response and whether other partner organisations like ambulances are required.

Overall, the project extended the use of AV to support the control staff in their situation awareness and help them to better respond to 999 calls from Londoners.