It was a sight that nightmares are made of; Tons of rubble and rebar and the screams of people trapped after a terrorist detonated an improvised car bomb at a school where a town meeting was being held. Â The walking wounded swarmed first responders as they arrived on site and the dead could be seen on the school ground.
This was the scene that hundreds of search and rescue personnel encountered at Joint Base Cape Cod during a continuous 72-hour response exercise called Operation SCORE (Statewide Collapse Operations Response Exercise), a full-scale mobilization exercise designed to challenge and assess the fire service’s technical rescue capability statewide.  The exercise included 350 members of the Massachusetts National Guard and more than 300 technical rescue experts from all over the state.  Statewide interagency cooperation was also put to the test and included the Massachusetts National Guard, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services.
Sponsored by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and Homeland Response Force Region 1, Blueforce Development was selected as the software stack to deliver real-time situational awareness to the Incident Command Post, but also amongst commanders on the ground at the pile for the operation. Â Blueforce products leveraged included:
- BlueforceTACTICAL software was deployed on Kyocera DuraForce PRO smartphones for the responders and shared real-time location, proximity, position/motion, audio, biotelemetry, and fused multi-gas and gamma radiological detection.
- BlueforceCOMMAND for Windows was deployed on Microsoft Surface PROs for use by commanders managing the operation on the ground.
- BlueforceCOMMAND for HTML5 was deployed at the Incident Command Post for the incident commander and his team.
- BlueforceTACTICAL for Android was also utilized with an on-site ad-hoc unattended ground sensor to share weather data (wind speed, wind plume, WBGT), industrial gas detection , and gamma radiological detection.
- Blueforce Video Streams: Live video streams from the site were made sharable amongst mobile users and the Command Post using TSE low light, infrared cameras with video exfil to cloud based video reflectors. Â Dejero for iOS was also demonstrated as a means to use off the shelf smartphones to capture and send live video streams.
The result: Incident Commanders on the scene offered that the Blueforce product suite provided superior situational awareness by enabling shared and distributed awareness that included location, sensor telemetry, imagery sharing, and proximity data. Â This operational view was available in the Command Post, but also to commanders on the pile. Â An After Action Report is available to official government agencies on request. Â For more information, send an email to info@blueforcedev.com or call us at 866-960-0204.
