Inter-agency channels

Emergency services based outside London were involved in the Olympic Games too. Also speaking was Olaf Baars, of the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service, whose territory includes part of the water park at Eton Dorney, site of the rowing and sprint canoeing events; the remainder is served by the neighbouring Buckinghamshire brigade.

“Dorney Lake site needed to be completely transformed in order to provide facilities necessary to accommodate, feed and water 30 000+ spectators, 5000 press, 2000 staff, up to 7000 officials plus other accredited individuals”, he said.

“This was one of the Olympic events, and the whole of the Olympics was co-ordinated from London. Thames Valley Police had a Gold cell operating in info mode throughout the Olympics and that was connected to the venue Silver, which was operating throughout the Olympics, and then to small rooms in both Bucks and Berkshire Fire. They operated the main Silver for the venue out of the Taplow police base, a few miles from the venue.

“All of the communications were done through Airwave, and the communications channels were not dedicated for the Olympics – they were using the predetermined inter-agency operability channels to ensure that police, fire and ambulance were able to keep abreast of what was going on at all times.”

With recent flooding emergencies elsewhere in the UK still fresh in the collective memory, Mr Baars’s team was well aware of water hazards which could threaten an event taking place in the Thames flood plain. But fire risks also figured large in the planning. “Of course, sports grounds don’t burn, do they?”, Mr Burns demanded, rhetorically. “Everyone remembers Bradford City Football Club in 1985, which burned spectacularly, killing 56 people and injuring 265 others.

“Whilst we didn’t have any fire issues at Eton Dorney during the Olympics, down at Weymouth, right at the beginning of the Olympics, the media centre did suffer a fire – and once again, because of the plans that were put in place, it didn’t disrupt what went on down at Weymouth, and things went ahead smoothly.”

Asked about the massive amount of pre-Olympic planning that took place, and what lessons from it might feed into planning for future events, Mr Baars commented: “Co-operation between the emergency services has never been as clear-cut and as focused as it has been over the last year or so, leading up to the Olympics. There is a very clear approach to dealing with these sorts of issues now. I hope that doesn’t get lost.”

Radio underground

Another communication project in London’s Olympic year was a major Wi-Fi roll-out for stations on the London Underground railway network. “We were asked to support the Games by preparing to expand our capability, our own networks, our telecom locations and our Airwave capabilities – everything we do”, explained Steve Townsend, chief information officer for Transport for London (TfL), the body responsible for the capital’s transport strategy. “We spent about £6½ billion in the buildup to the Games to do that: we had line upgrades, we had new trains, we had additional capacity on the Docklands Light Railway.

“Compared to our business as usual, we doubled and tripled and in many cases beat all of our records every day that we supplied transport.”

To guide these extra visitors, who included some 6·25 million ticketed Olympic spectators – and also Londoners coping with diverted bus routes and altered service patterns – some 4500 ‘travel ambassadors’ were deployed. These ambassadors needed real-time information with which to advise travellers – and each was issued with a personal iPad or iPhone connected to live data distributed from TfL’s command and control centres.

It was the Wi-Fi network that delivered this information. The origins of the project lay back in 2007, in the early planning stages of the Games. “We were before the world of smartphones then”, said Matt Griffin, of TfL, taking up the story. “But even by text and using their BlackBerrys to access real-time information, people would go on to the platform and, if asked by somebody when the next Circle Line train was, they would know – and our customer service advisers [CSAs] didn’t know. So we identified that we needed to get access to it on to the platforms.”

At that time a typical station had only a 2 Gbit/s link or an ADSL line into the station supervisor’s office, plus separate CCTV and public address systems. No other technology was available for staff in the whole of the station: it was an information desert.

Public access

A first step was taken in 2008 with a pilot project delivering Wi-Fi to 10 station platforms. Through a link to the existing BlackBerry service, this gave CSAs access to live information for the first time. “We also thought we could give this to the public too”, Mr Griffin said. “So we did a trial at Charing Cross [station], totally separate from our network, avoiding all of the security issues there. And what that told us really was how to deliver infrastructure into our stations.
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