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Gold Medal Security

Wireless technology and interoperability were big winners at the 2002 Winter Games.

The Olympics come around just once every four years, and an athlete preparing for the Games might do so with a life-or-death mindset. Since the opportunity may not present itself again, there's no room for error. Those people responsible for coordinating public safety at the 2002 Winter Olympics know the feeling.

There may not have been a better venue for a group looking to make a statement through violent means than a gathering of the best athletes in the world, televised to some 3.4 billion people around the globe. With an influx of 2 million visitors, literally doubling the host state of Utah's population, local public safety officials had a huge logistical exercise on their hands.

Consider this: 10,000 public safety people from more than 60 different agencies were called in to work the Games, including FBI and Secret Service members from around the world; the National Guard; public works; fire departments; and various law enforcement agencies.

There were 15 major venues and 180 ancillary locations throughout the state that hosted some type of Olympic event, whether a medal ceremony or an actual sporting event, and there were 900 square miles to monitor. But the biggest challenge, perhaps, was that tons of information had to be analyzed and disseminated to myriad groups and made easy for everyone to understand. The costs were huge as well: between $300 million and $400 million, according to government estimates.

It was an enormous exercise in interoperability with wireless technology as the guts of the operation. Pagers, radios, cell phones, laptop computers, handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) and wireless cameras all contributed to the coordination of countless entities.

"The discussion you had when you looked at all of this was 'OK, we've got a whole bunch of people who maybe aren't from here or aren't used to manipulating data in the way that we're going to need them to in order for them to be knowledgeable,"' said Maj. Stu Smith, who is the commander of Utah's Division of Emergency Services and Homeland Security.

The discussions Smith talked about dated back six years, but the effort was launched officially in 1998, when the Utah Legislature created the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command. It assembled a group of partners representing federal, state and local government to work to make the Games safe.

Diverse Groups
A key to coordinating the communication of a diverse group of public safety officials was using the existing infrastructure. In late 2001, the state put in a Motorola 800 MHz communications system that handled more than 8.5 million calls during the 17-day event.

But also important was bringing in some technology that would transcend some of the logistical situations that might occur.

"It could be things like, 'Where are the fireplugs located because we're going to put up fences and we don't want to block them?' 'Where are the roads?' 'What roads [got] blocked off and in what directions because we changed directions on one-way streets?'" Smith said. "Now, if we reroute trucks and deliveries so we don't have eight trucks downtown all at once blocking access, how are we going to coordinate all that?'"

Traditionally, police, fire and public safety communicate with radio systems. But when there are thousands of people talking and passing information at the same time, the messages can blur. Sometimes the gravity of a message is better conveyed with a preprogrammed message, which also has the advantage of being delivered on a need-to-know basis.

"Take the Secret Service; they brought in agents from all over the world to work the games," Smith said. "They had a couple thousand people here, but those people weren't used to working together. It's fine to have radios, but the terrain of the area, the geography didn't lend itself to clear communication with radios all the time."

That's where the two-way pagers came in. Utah brought in about 800 of the devices, and they proved invaluable.

"You could go back and forth with some really quick messages and get a lot of business done and have that done routinely," Smith said. "We were able to have that done in a secure environment, which was something new. We ran encryption across the top of what we did in secure paging, which was very effective."

There were other instances where the two-way pagers proved superior to other communication technology, such as cell phones.

"The noise factor for cell phones is very difficult," Smith said. "You get out in an area where there's huge street noise - the two-way pagers always do better in those situations, and they work night and day and during tough weather conditions."

Indeed, the temperatures were 53 degrees below the average during the first few days of the Games, yet there were no problems with the pagers.

The Motorola P935 pagers were teamed with V-ONE AIR SmartGate security servers to provide both paging and e-mail. The two-way pagers were put into the hands of key personnel in all of the agencies involved. Users could "blast" messages - a quick and efficient way of getting out information to many other people - or they could send to specific users.

Geo-Fencing Technology
One of the most crucial aspects of public safety at the Games was the protection of the nearly 2,500 athletes. The athletes were never far out of the reach of safety personnel who used GPS-based automatic vehicle location devices on the vehicles that transported athletes.

Security officials created "geo-fencing," a program using in-house and off-the-shelf products that literally put up a GIS fence, and if the vehicle strayed beyond that fence the authorities knew about it immediately.

All the athletes were assigned set routes of travel, and the GPS devices were programmed to alert authorities when the vehicle wondered off that route. Variances were set to about one block, so if the vehicle strayed off course more than a block an authority would know about it.

"We were watching 250 vehicles at any one time, and if any one strayed off course we knew it immediately," said Sgt. Dan Catlin, traffic and transit commander at the Games. "We didn't have any security incidents; there were several times when drivers got lost, and we radioed route instructions to them."

The concept holds possibilities for future use as well.

"Things like hazardous waste shipments or any high-value cargo or anything that you wanted to really watch carefully, geo-fencing all of a sudden becomes a very interesting way to do that," said Smith. "If you take that concept and link it to data fields that you may have, or databases, and do it either static or live, it lends itself to some great imagination to what becomes possible in the area of protecting that kind of infrastructure."

In the end, the big winners in these Games were wireless technology and the potential of interoperability.

"One of the things that was different in these Games was we did the same thing with private security and private industry," said Smith. "If they had an interest and wanted to come and play, we invited them all into our command center and showed them how our intelligence worked. We passed them intelligence that was appropriate for them to have, and they pushed that out through their pager network the same way we did."