The Calgary Emergency Operations Center (EOC)

For those of you who were at the southern Alberta preparedness meeting this past Saturday, you will remember I mentioned the cities new emergency operations Center. Some of you had questions, so I dug up a bit of info on it, as well as a few pictures. This building is a fortified command Center that is used during major emergencies to maintain command over responders and to keep a unified command structure for the city safe. Here is an article I found describing it:

"...The extensive activity of the energy industry in Alberta is causing a major boost to the provincial economy, and Calgary in particular is forecast to have the best economic growth in the country from 2013 to 2016, according to the Conference Board of Canada. This is good news for the city, and the municipality is working hard to ensure its infrastructure is equipped to meet the growing population’s demands.

Calgary just completed one of its largest projects – the Calgary Emergency Operations Center (EOC), which is a project that has been lead by Bird Construction.

“The city is growing so fast and the original Emergency Operations Centre was a 1940s building that had about 800 to 900 square feet for fire department dispatch operations,” explains Greg Wilkes, deputy chief and program manager, Calgary Fire Department. “In 2005, Calgary had a lot of flooding and the EOC was open for a month to help residents. Our mayor said we needed an EOC that was befitting our city – a city of more than 1 million people.”

As a result, city officials got started planning the new EOC. The project has been of such magnitude – and of such critical importance to Calgary – that it required “four years of legwork upfront,” Wilkes says. Not only did the city have to determine the project’s budget and get community input, but also what features the centre would have and services it would provide.

STRUCTURAL AND OPERATIONAL STRENGTH

The city’s original EOC was a two-story building used by the Calgary Fire Department for fire dispatch, but over the years it evolved to house 9-1-1 fire and EMS dispatch. Not only was this original structure too small, Wilkes notes, but it lacked the technology necessary to respond to large-scale emergencies in the city.

Managed by the Calgary Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) along with the Calgary Fire Department, the EOC was designed to reflect the Calgary Municipal Emergency Plan, which takes an “all hazards approach” to emergency events in the city. “Calgary Emergency Management plans for and responds to major emergencies in Calgary,” the agency says. “To be most effective, we collaborate with a host of agencies and organizations.”

According to the agency, the all-hazards approach to emergencies “allows the director of emergency management maximum flexibility in allocating resources appropriate to the circumstances. The plan’s strength lies in Calgary Emergency Management’s partnership with more than 30 agency members, all working with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.”

Construction on the new $54 million EOC began in May 2009 and it was substantially completed on time this October. The main level has two separate buildings – one houses the reception area, media centre including a workroom and briefing room, and the second structure contains generators and a loading dock. There are also two levels below ground that contain CEMA offices, an operations room and a data centre.

“We had a lengthy community consultation process, and one of the main things we learned was that the community did not want a large, obtrusive building,” Wilkes explains.

“With two levels underground, we have built-in security and the structure’s exposure is limited, so we don’t have to use as much heat in the winter. It was challenging to build – it had to be built like big bathtub – but it is great for the EOC’s needs.”

The EOC also has a geographic information system that will provide live feeds from city traffic and police helicopter cameras, and will display maps with embedded information. “All cameras throughout the city feed to the EOC so we can see what’s going on during an emergency,” Wilkes notes. The structure was built to sustain itself for 72 hours “off the grid.”

CEMA says the EOC’s systems will enable it to provide essential coordination for city business units and external partners that allow them to respond to and recover from an emergency event faster. The agency understands that during an emergency there’s a chance some of the technology won’t be available, but even so, it wanted to take advantage of as much of the available technology that it could.

“The EOC has built-in redundancies, so we will be able to sustain operations for a long period of time, even if there are power outages,” Wilkes says. “The centre has been designed so that we can still operate the city, even if we have to go back to paper. Technology is great when it’s there, but you can’t totally rely on it.”

‘SOPHISTICATED, COMPLICATED’

The EOC was designed and built to meet a minimum LEED Silver certification, but it is being submitted to the CaGBC as a candidate for LEED Gold. According to project architect Manasc Isaac, CEMA wanted the EOC to reflect the best available environmental design practices to minimize its impact on the environment and help it to remain a high-performance structure that produced minimal material and energy waste. The EOC’s strength – in terms of structure and systems – was of utmost importance because of the critical role it will play in a city emergency, Wilkes notes.

“The EOC was built to be resilient and able to sustain operations even if it has to be off the city’s power grid,” he says. “It had been constructed to sustain anything Mother Nature throws at it. This is a place where the mayor and city council will come to operate the city during an emergency – it has to ensure operational continuity.”

Construction manager Bird Construction and the rest of the project team was key in ensuring the needs of the agency were met in the design and construction of the EOC, Wilkes adds.

“Bird made this a very transparent process and from the outset put their senior people on this project,” he says. “This was a very sophisticated project and had to be built correctly from the start, and that’s what happened. We were able to overcome a lot of challenges together because it was such a collaborative process.”

The EOC will have about 25 staff on a daily basis, and most had moved in by the end of October. Equipment and supplies will continue to be moved into the centre over the next few months, but at this time, CEMA is completing the final testing and commissioning of the structure’s systems, especially the generators and other building systems to ensure full operability.

“This is a very sophisticated, complicated building, and there is still some work to do to get it to run at optimum efficiency,” Wilkes says. “A few things still need to be cleaned up, but we’re very pleased with the result..."

So this begs the question: if the city of Is preparing, why isn't everyone else?

I will leave you with some pictures of the cities fortified command bunker known as the EOC.