NENA Mourns Fallen AZ Firefighters

As part of the public safety family, NENA is saddened by the tragic loss of 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a crew of elite wildland firefighters based in Prescott, AZ, who were killed in the Yarnell Hill fire early last week. We honor the fallen for their brave public service and hold them in our memory.

 

NENA Seeks Applications to Fill Vacant Western Region Director Position

As of June 20, 2013, Chip Yarborough has resigned his position on the NENA Executive Board. President Bernard Brown accepted Yarborough's resignation, and expressed thanks on behalf of the organziation for Yarborough's service to NENA. 
 
To fill the vacant Western Region Director position, which will be up for election in 2014, NENA is seeking applications from eligible candidates (current members in good standing who are also Emergency Number Professionals [ENPs] and reside in the Western region).
 
To apply, please submit a Nomination Form and a letter of interest/personal statement to NENA President Brown by July 15, 2013. Also, be sure to review the Executive Board Statement of Responsibilities before applying.
 
The new Western Region Director will be announced on or before July 25, 2013.

 

Articles on the Changing Face of Technology Wanted for Publication

 

ENP Study Group Now Forming

 

National 9-1-1 Program Presents NG9-1-1 Webinar on July 10

 

NENA 2013 Wrap-Up...

Thanks to all who helped make NENA 2013 such an amazing event! Big thanks to our sponsors, speakers, exhibitors, volunteers and especially the attendees who took the time out of their busy lives to join us in Charlotte! 

• Couldn't attend? Visit the NENA Live Learning Center to purchase online, on-demand access to audio and synchronized presentation materials from nearly every Education & Training Session held at NENA 2013.
  
  
• Head over to the NENA Facebook page for more than 1,000 pictures from the conference.
  
  
• Watch a segment about NENA 2013 that aired on Charlotte local news.
  
  
• Read about NENA's special screening of The Call that benefited the NENA Foundation's Friends of 9-1-1 campaign.
  
  
• Listen to dozens of interviews done by Mark Fletcher & Guy Clinch of the Avaya Podcast Network and Ricardo Martinez's Within the Trenches podcast.
  
  
• Read about the local & national 9-1-1 heroes honored at NENA 2013.

• Watch the NENA 2013 Expo Hall go from bare floor, to show time, and back to bare floor.. all in under three minutes.
  

 

Save the Date & Budget Now to Attend...

 

Save up to 32% on UPS Shipping With This Special NENA Offer

 

NENA Member Rewards Program: Join & Start Saving Today!

 

NENA CMCP Coming to CO, AB, & FL!

NENA's Center Manager Certification Program (CMCP) is designed to equip recently hired, newly promoted, and aspiring PSAP and 9-1-1 Authority managers and supervisors with the tools needed to effectively manage their agency through a rigorous 40-hour course of lecture and lab-based education. For more seasoned 9-1-1 professionals, the CMCP may serve to fill in some of the gaps and strengthen core competencies required in emergency communications center management.

The CMCP, unlike many other upper-level emergency communications training programs, utilizes a real-world, hands-on approach that is focused on topics encountered daily by managerial and supervisory level personnel: Business Writing, Financial Management, Human Resources, Legal Issues, and Communications Skills. With a curriculum built by current and former 9-1-1 center managers with decades of combined supervisory and training experience, the program will provide you with knowledge and skills that can immediately and drastically improve your on-the-job effectiveness and enhance your agency's everyday operations.

Register for upcoming CMCPs:

 

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Make sure the addresses (email and postal) that we have on file for you are current! Please log in to your online member account to verify or update your information, or send an email to Bri Robinson.

 

TERT Newsletter Update: It's Just What We Do

by Aubrey Scanlon, Communications Manager, Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office

Severe weather is a way of life in Oklahoma. In the comm. center, we look upon the storm season with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Several tornadoes have impacted our county directly in the last nearly 15 years, so it is not new to us. We discuss, we practice.Still, you never feel quite ready when the real deal is finally here. Nothing can really prepare you for the things we dealt with the last two weeks of May 2013.

May 18, 2013, was the celebration of my 14th year with the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office. I reflected on how much I've learned and how far I've come. When I started in 1999, I missed the historic May 3 tornado by just a couple weeks. Since then we have had tornadoes in 2003, 2010, and 2011 in which I was in Dispatch and actively working.

The 2013 storm season had been blessedly quiet up to that point, unusual for Oklahoma. The good thing about being in Tornado Alley is that we have some of the best meteorologists in the world right here in our own backyard. The tricky thing about severe weather is that you never know just how severe it is going to be. However, we have grown accustomed to receiving threat analysis at least a day or two ahead of a big storm. The weekend of May 17-19 was no different.

As the Communication Manager, I have learned to keep a close eye on the weather. I utilize various sources, including local meteorologists and social media. I am still learning to discern those who are imparting solid information that should be considered closely and those who are not. All sources unanimously agreed that weekend would be the weekend for significant weather...

Continue reading...

View the full July TERT Newsletter.

 

Call for Volunteers for a Forest Guide Working Group

NENA is seeking participants for a Working Group to focus on the NG9-1-1 functional element known as the Forest Guide.  The forest guides (FG) are related to the LVF and ECRF functional elements. The FGs are necessary to have multiple instances of LVF/ECRF interact with each other.

This working group will provide the specific and detailed information that could be used by an entity to identify what is required to develop, deploy and support a forest guide. This information may be in the form of a Request for Information (RFI) that would allow entities to identify specific functions that must be done and evaluate the effort to provide that function. The output of this working group may be more specific by providing requirements that an entity must meet and detailing specific implementation options.  

Background from NENA Issue Statement:

RFC 5822 and NENA’s 08-003 define a hierarchy of Emergency Call Routing/Location Validation Functions (ECR/LVF’s) service response mechanism as "trees" that can be represented by their geographic coverage area. Information is organized hierarchically, in a tree, with tree nodes representing larger geographic areas pointing to several child nodes, each representing a smaller area. A collection of ECR/LVF’s servicing separate ESInets is called a forest. A forest guide (FG) keeps track of the coverage regions of all the trees for one service and location profile. So for example there may be a national forest guide that knows about all of the state forest guides. The state forest guide knows about all of the ECR/LVF’s within the state. When a validation application or routing application wants to validate a location or route a call the application only needs to know about one forest guide and by interrogating that forest guide it can be directed through the hierarchy to obtain validation or routing information. A server that does not answer the query can refer to a Forest Guide to determine what server should provide the response.

NENA 08-003 states "The Forest Guide must be managed nationally (agency not yet identified) and may evolve to an entity more representative of all public safety agencies. State ECR/LVF operators are responsible to arrange for their mappings to be provisioned in the national forest guide. The national forest guide operator will maintain well known contact information so that other national forest guides can arrange to exchange their coverage regions and mappings."

As pointed out in the quote an agency to manage the national forest guide has not yet been identified.

Feel free to pass this information along to any colleagues who may not be part of this distribution. Interested parties should contact the Working Group chair, Jim Shepard (512.656.7713). Please note that this Working Group has a short timeframe to complete its scope. Active attendance and participation will be required if you choose to sign up.  

 

NENA Registry System Now Available

Today, NENA is pleased to announce the public availability of the NENA Registry System or NRS. We are excited about this important milestone and want to thank Brian Dupras for all the hours of personal time he spent in developing and coding this critical system. Without his commitment to NENA and 9-1-1, the NRS would not be available today. NENA would also like to thank Jason Horning and Delaine Arnold for the time they have spent making the NRS a reality and available to all parties requiring this information. The NENA Registry System may be found at http://technet.nena.org/nrs.

The NRS was documented in the NENA Registry System Standard (NENA STA 70-001) to serve as a central repository and access point for registries created within NENA standards. Registries are the byproduct of thoughtful workgroup consideration and serve as consensus on the allowable identifiers, constants, and other well-known values that are exchanged within NG9-1-1. Today the NRS holds many of the registries created by NENA's Detailed Functional and Interface Specification for the NENA i3 Solution – Stage 3 (08-003 v1). In the future, the NRS will hold new registries already under development. As NENA's standards work their way through the necessary comment and approval processes, updates will be made to the NRS.

Through the NRS, NENA is also offering everyone an opportunity to submit new registry values. Each submittal will be considered in accordance with the NENA Registry System Standard and, if approved, added to the NRS.

 

Call for Volunteers to Update the FGDC United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, & Postal Address Data Standard

NENA and URISA are calling for volunteers to assist with an update to the FGDC United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard.

URISA's Address Standard Working Group (ASWG), a collaboration of volunteers from over 50 federal, state, tribal, local and private organizations, was convened in 2005 to draft an address data standard for submission to the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). That task culminated in February 2011 with the formal endorsement of the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard by the FGDC. The US Census Bureau is the maintenance authority for the Standard.
 
Since the endorsement in 2011, some issues and problems with the current version of the Standard have been brought to light, and opportunities for collaboration have been identified to improve the standard.
 
Under the auspices of the US Census Bureau, the ASWG is reconvening  to draft a revision to the current version of the Standard to: Correct typos, errors and omissions in the standard; make adjustments to improve and ease the implementation and usage of the standard; improve its coordination with other national and international standards; and correct any issues that have arisen due to implementation of the Standard.

If you have professional or academic expertise in address or information exchange systems, you are encouraged to volunteer by sending an email to Keri Brennan at URISA Headquarters by Monday, July 15.

 

"Big 4" Carriers File First Quarterly Text-to-9-1-1 Reports, Deploy Bounce-Back Messaging

Pursuant to the agreement reached in December 2012 between NENA, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, and APCO, the nation's four largest wireless carriers have submitted their first round of quarterly text-to-9-1-1 deployment progress reports.

• Read the Verizon report
• Read the AT&T report
• Read the Sprint report
• Read the T-Mobile report

Most significantly, as agreed to in December and under rules adopted by the FCC in May, bounce-back notifications are now being sent to wireless subscribers when text-to-9-1-1 is unavailable in their area. In areas where text-to-9-1-1 is not available, consumers will receive an immediate response that the service is not supported and to contact emergency services by another means, such as by making a voice call or using telecommunications relay services (if deaf, hard of hearing, or speech disabled) to access 9-1-1.

"This is an important milestone on the path to ubiquitous text-to-9-1-1 service," said NENA CEO Brian Fontes. "Due to the incremental nature of text-to-9-1-1 deployment, it is essential that the public be made aware of when and where text-to-9-1-1 is available. NENA thanks the FCC and the wireless carriers for taking this swift action that nearly eliminates the risk of citizens in need mistakenly believing that a text message for assistance has been received by 9-1-1 in areas where the service is unavailable."

Under the December agreement, text-to-9-1-1 service capabilities will be deployed throughout the carriers’ wireless networks by May 15, 2014. However, text-to-9 1 1 service availability will ultimately hinge on the deployment of hardware, software, and training at the more than 6,000 9-1-1 centers across America.

 

Get the Emergency Communications News That Really Matters With Public Safety SmartBrief

NENA recently launched a FREE email news service called Public Safety SmartBrief. It provides a weekly summary of news, trends and updates on public safety issues - not just 9-1-1, but police, fire and EMS. Knowledgeable editors handpick key articles from hundreds of publications, summarize them, and provide direct links to the original sources.

 

Enhanced Career Center Now Available

 

Locating the Future Conference Call for Presentations Deadline Extended to July 15