Lesia Dickson: Well, I can see why. From a FirstNet standpoint, we're about mobile communications and mobile broadband. How do you see mobile broadband fitting into this new world of emergency management?

Wes Dison: Well, I don't know that it fits in. I think it more dictates because really today is not about being tied to a desk or a computer anymore, it's about mobile. One of the tests that we have is informing our governor, Governor Ducey. He's a very active person, he's out and about all the time. He carries a tablet with him, so being able to provide him again that live-time or as close to live-time as possible in many cases live-time situational awareness information, is, it's required any more.

Lesia Dickson: Absolutely. Well, you mentioned something that I bring up quite often at FirstNet which is EOC’s are not just in buildings and bunkers anymore they're out there, mobile. So what are some of the technologies that you are using in Arizona today relative to mobile?

Wes Dison: Probably, we have two principle situational awareness tools that we're using: Web EOC, which is pretty common to a lot of emergency management agencies across the country, now. We are heavily invested in Web EOC. We currently have an enterprise application for that – that includes all of our counties, all of our tribes, and it's quite successful. We’re into going to re-write now, and a rebuild, and refresh of the program if you will, and that's our primary crisis emergency management information-sharing tool. Although we use it every single day 24 hours a day seven days a week. So, that's our primary tool, and then because that's simply a narrative device, we have in the last year and a half, heavily invested in ArcGIS and that provides the visual connects to the narrative. In this age, the governor doesn't like to read a bunch of narrative. He likes to look at a map, or look at an illustration, or look at something else that gives him kind of an instant snapshot of maybe that press interview that's coming, something like that. So, we are heavily invested in ArcGIS. We like, again many agencies across the state, are using a dashboard developed through ArcGIS that provides – we’ll speak about the governor in specific – provides him a statewide view of everything that's going on within the state enterprise. Whether it's flooding, it's modeled off to the ESF structure, and so he can look at any one point in time and see what's going on with fires, or flooding, or traffic, or a hazmat situation somewhere. And so, those are the two primary tools that we're using. So, we have a narrative, and we have a visualization tool.

Lesia Dickson: Right, well a picture’s worth a thousand words or a million for sure.

Wes Dison: Yes ma’am.

Wes Dison: Well, I you know I will confess to not knowing a lot about that yet. I still think it's very emerging. We are actually currently engaged in some effort to explore that in Arizona. I think the key behind it though is: whatever that looks like, whatever the technology is, the demand from the public and from local leaders is no longer a reactionary posture, but more of a predictive posture; trying to get some idea of what this thing; a special event, a fire, a flood, what it’s going to look like, where it's going to go, there's historical information. Floods pretty much usually go in the same place, right? So if you have prior flood history, how can you access that, maybe visualize it, and make decisions ahead of time so that you can block the roadways, or close the underpass, or whatever it might be in order to avoid a problem rather than to respond to it.

Lesia Dickson: That's excellent, you know, in my past experience, it seems like we were really excited to get a data stream and do something with it, but now it seems like the challenge is to get multiple data streams and somehow put them together and make decisions with them. How do you see that kind of playing out in the future to bring these datasets together?

Wes Dison: Well I think that's actually a key challenge, because there are so many data streams available now, pretty much every day I learned was something new in Arizona that I didn't even know we had. Our Department of Public Safety is installing haboob sensors, dust storm sensors – that's all live-time information. I think what we’re challenged with now is how to garner all that information through all those different streams and very quickly, if not instantly, put that into some format that's usable – where a decision-maker can go: I've got this, this, this, this, this, I need to do that, and that needs to happen that quick or quicker. And there are a variety of different systems coming online to do that, and so I think that's going to be the challenge is, now we're almost at a situation where we've got information overload and we have to figure out how to manage that information so that it doesn't manage us.

Lesia Dickson: Absolutely, well and you have another major challenge and there's many states that are faced with it, which is a very challenging geography. In that, a lot of your state is well, almost all I would say is desert except for some mountains, right? So, how do you see technology helping you to manage that geography?

Wes Dison: Well, like you said we've got, we've got very arid deserts, and we've got very high-range mountains, so the data streams coming out of those are very different. We're fortunate in that we typically don't have a statewide event that covers both of those regions. Although, recently the last couple of days we've been dealing with Hurricane Rosa, the effects of Hurricane Rosa, which was a statewide event. But capturing that data, visualizing it, is a really big key, Again, we can look at, I can look at, some of the maps that we have available through our dashboard right now from a statewide perspective and get pretty much an instant view of what's happening irregardless of the terrain, right? Do we have flooding in the mountains? Do we have flooding in the desert? It's really the same question, but how much, and where, and current data streams are able to do that for us. We have stream sensors online. We have cameras online. The addition of the ability to shoot live video is going to be huge. The emergence of FirstNet and some of the capabilities on the Band 14, to be able to shoot live video I think is going to be a big game-changer for emergency management. It will provide us a perspective we don't currently have, in that, and I think I've said this to you before, we sit in a room, we're not out in the field typically. We have some liaisons out in the field, but really, we sit in, we sit in a room. The first responders out there, that are carrying phones that’re carrying whatever devices can provide a tremendous amount of live real-time information that allows us to make these predictive decisions ahead of time.

Lesia Dickson: If you could tap into it.

Wes Dison: Absolutely.

Lesia Dickson: So I know that we met at Grand Canyon West and we were at an exercise that was actually put on by your Arizona FirstNet team. And you know, we learned a lot there, FirstNet did, but where do you see exercises taking us in terms of communications? Where can we use exercises to help kind of flesh out that vision?

Wes Dison: Well, you know, I think it's pretty, it’s a cliché statement, but what we always hear is, ‘What's the first thing to fail?’ and it’s communications, communications, communications. The exercise world in emergency management has evolved, through HSEEP and some of the other efforts. The need to exercise communications – we're trying to emphasize that on a much more regular basis. We do communication drills statewide every Wednesday. Those are largely LMR networks that were exercising there, but with the advancement we're now doing Web EOC communications on the same Wednesday and testing and some training. Just the ability to keep people current on the tools that are there because the tools are changing so much every day. You can't exercise once a year anymore, or twice a year anymore, because there's so many changes from what you did a month ago that we're really trying to emphasize doing exercises on a much, much more frequent basis. And drills, exercise might not be a completely accurate term. Drills – we use drills quite a bit more often.

Lesia Dickson: Well, that's exciting. I'm excited for FirstNet to work more closely with you in the future and I believe that our partnership can do a lot towards moving mobile communications, and data sharing, and emergency management. The United States obviously had a loss, and certainly it was more personal to Arizona, in the death of Senator John McCain. That brings a very important big event to your area. How did you fit into that response and what kind of communications did it require?

FirstNet phones were also distributed amongst several key players, to key individuals that were involved in the process of moving the ceremonies forward.

Lesia Dickson: Awesome, well I'm glad we were a part, and you know I think at its hard emergency management is about saving lives and property, just like all public safety primary disciplines are. But tell me, kind of in summary, what do you see as the role of a broadband, of data communications, of data feeds, and just especially mobile, in actually saving lives and actually changing the outcome of incidents and impacting the saving of lives and property?

Wes Dison: Well, I think what you said is key, ‘changing the outcomes’. So, if we can figure out a way to harness this information to acquire it, eyes on, really good, accurate data feeds. If we can figure a way to create those to bring them in to manage them, the consequence management piece of an event I think is impacted tremendously, in that we can manage or eliminate potential consequences way up front. So life-saving, let's talk about that. We know where all of our river crossings are. We know where every year, we have people cross those river crossings, get washed away and die. There’s tragedies [that] happen every year, it's happened forever. I think we're in a position now where we're able to start looking at video from a FirstNet phone, water sensor that's in the river, a camera on the roadway, whatever the, whatever the data stream is that will allow us to go, “You know there's a storm coming.

Let's close that road crossing now, while it's dry, rather than responding to the car floating down the river an hour from now,” because we have to get in front of events whenever we possibly can. Dealing with the loss of a life that a river crossing is of course way tragic. We don't want to do that if we can avoid that ahead of time. So, I think what you said is, dealing with the consequences that we can eliminate ahead of time with solid, quick, accurate information is, it’s required it’s what we, as a profession, is what we want to accomplish.

Lesia Dickson: Right. Wes, I really appreciate you visiting with us today. We appreciate your partnership.

Wes Dison: Thank you.