NAPSG Foundation Virtual Training: Charlotte FD & Democratic National Convention 

Please join us for an inside-the-hood training session on how the Charlotte Fire Department developed and utilized cutting edge geospatial capabilities during the 2012 Democratic National Convention (DNC).  This training session will be led by Deputy Fire Chief Jeff Dulin, a 30 year veteran and Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director.

The week-long Convention brought over a thousand scheduled events/activities across dozens of locations in the Charlotte area, transforming downtown Charlotte into a “DNC City” with over 150,000 attendees.  In order to manage these events, to guarantee the safety and security of the attendees, the Charlotte Fire Department had to coordinate and collaborate with numerous  Local, State, Bi-State (North Carolina/South Caroline) and Federal agencies on a 24/7 basis.

To facilitate that coordination, CFD’s GIS and Operations Divisions worked with G&H International to create a new Event Web/Mobile Map Management Solution to visualize and track the events across space and time to provide necessary real-time information and locate resources to various Command Centers.  Moreover, the tool, through its integration with CFD’s COBRA and other tools, enabled the department to add, on the fly, important contextual information that enhanced the ability to make timely resource and deployment decisions.

The volume of events/activities combined with the necessity of sharing information and resources with numerous organizations and agencies, including the United States Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation, provided multiple challenges for the DNC Command Staff – some of which will be discussed in the training session.  In order to address the complexity of issues, CFD was able to share the Event Web/Mobile Map Management Solution with these agencies enabling all of them to use this single tool as their tracking tool.  The ability to share the use of the tool reflects CFD”s approach of using GIS to empower the entire – cross discipline/cross jurisdiction – operations team rather than rely on a potential single point of failure.

Drawing on the lessons learned from DNC, CFD is further augmenting the ability of the tool by making it simpler for non-technical staff to use, as well as creating an Operations Library enabling users to draw on an archive of special events data for planning purposes.  All of this provides yet further evidence of the power GIS for planning and collaboration.

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