The van was part of a multi-jurisdictional exercise, called Central Gateway, designed to test emergency preparedness for Windsor and the County of Essex. The City of Windsor was on board, along with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and a half dozen others, including several major energy companies and authorities in the neighbouring City of Detroit.

Another major contributor was the University of Windsor, in particular, Sgt. Chris Zelezney, who starting laying the groundwork for emergency planning several years ago. In the wake of the twin tragedies at Dawson College and Virginia Tech, the university took a closer look at its own emergency preparedness plans and found them “woefully inadequate,” says Zelezney. “We began the process of re-evaluation and formalization of emergency management on campus.”

Zelezney, first hired as a Special Constable in 1994, assumed the role of emergency preparedness co-ordinator and got to work. The university acquired mass notification and wireless public address systems, as well as beefing up its surveillance and purchasing several software packages: WebEOC, a virtual emergency operations centre, and Emergeo Fusionpoint, a dashboard tool designed to share information such as video feeds, GIS maps, activity logs and other relevant emergency data. The software was provided by FutureShield, a security solutions provider based in Bolton, Ont., who also provided training and support for more than 200 users.

In 2010, Zelezney decided to expand the reach and capabilities of the university’s newly established security operations and reached out to the City of Windsor and the County of Essex, in particular Phil Berthiaume, Emergency Management Coordinator for the County of Essex and Fire Chief Dave Fields of the City of Windsor. By providing various emergency departments and first responders access to the tools, data could be shared more easily, providing all parties the proverbial big picture of emergency events happening in the area.

“We can actually grow that virtual emergency operational centre on a regional basis,” says Zelezney. “It just makes sense.”

The Central Gateway exercise “came on the heels of that step of our development,” he says. Initially an exercise put together by the Windsor-Essex County Regional Emergency Management Coordination Committee, of which Zelesney is a member, it drew the interest of the DRDC Centre for Security Science (CSS), a joint endeavour between Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) and Public Safety Canada.

CSS saw the exercise as an ideal staging ground for its own research. “This exercise provided a chance to demonstrate some technology that promotes interoperability. That’s how I got involved,” says Jack Pagotto, head of emergency management and systems interoperability, science and technology at CSS.