The Portage County Emergency Management Agency has officially opened its new command center, which includes state-of-the-art multimedia monitoring and communication technology.
While the command center was built with modernization in mind, the key focus was to incorporate technology that enables EMA to swiftly handle any disaster that may arise.
“We have what we need in the county to make sure that, should a natural disaster happen, or even a cyber attack, or a malicious attack happen, we have the support here from this building that can help us relieve some of the heartache from it,” said Portage County Information Technology Services Director Cameron Singer. “It’s something nice to give the citizens of Portage County.”
The agency hosted an open house Oct. 1 to celebrate the official opening of the new center at 2978 state Route 59 in Ravenna Township.
The Portage County Commissioners funded the nearly $4.5 million project through the American Rescue Plan Act grant program.
The 6,120-square-foot building was designed by Hasenstab Architects of Akron and constructed by Summit Construction Company, with IT infrastructure designed by Portage County Information Technology Services, along with IT specialist Sam Roberts.
The main wing of the command center includes the executive room, the emergency operations center, the joint information center and a communications room, as well as ample office, storage space and a locker room with showers that doubles as a tornado safety area.
The executive room is a space where senior officials can plan and initiate the initial stages of a disaster effort.
“The executive room is to bring all of our policy makers, which are our elected officials, and a couple select department directors, into that space to, basically, approve how we are going to move forward and respond to the incident at hand,” Portage County Emergency Management Director Ryan Shackelford said. “[It’s] basically policy, moving money, funding, and setting the overall direction of how we’re going to respond to the incident.”
Once the executive team has approved a plan of action for disaster relief, they hand it over to a team working in the emergency operations center in the adjacent room, where they work to meet the objectives of the executive policy.
The joint information center [JIC] room is where public information officers monitor several multimedia platforms in an effort to implement rumor control, draft and prepare media releases and work to establish an accurate unified message for the community and stakeholders.
“In the world of emergency management, public information is one of those things that can either make or break an incident,” Emergency Management Specialist McKenzie Villatoro said. “So, when we were designing our information center, it was really important for us to have the access to watch and observe what is being said on local media, as well as national media. The screens that we have within our JIC are able to divide into 16 different inputs.”
Portage County Information Technology Services Director Singer, along with his team and IT specialist Roberts, designed the infrastructure for the command center’s multimedia monitoring and information technology system, an area that the EMA was deficient in during the COVID pandemic.
The IT system also includes Microsoft Teams software that enables the team to easily communicate with city officials, police and fire departments and the community, something that Shackelford wishes they had during the pandemic.
“Having the full Microsoft Teams room so that we can coordinate with local communities, and having the ability to display as much information and change between sources, and monitor and manage that, and keep situational awareness, is definitely the most state-of-the-art side of this facility,” Shackelford said. “With COVID, we did everything with Zoom calls; we really didn’t have HR policies and work from home. If there’s ever a future pandemic where we need to work in a virtual capacity, we have that with the Microsoft Teams room. We have a full Microsoft Teams emergency operations center kind of platform that McKenzie’s built with our IT department. We have the ability to do that, literally, with the click of a button. It’s so much more efficient than using the platforms we used during COVID.”
The main wing also includes a communication room with amateur ham radio capabilities and an attached 40-foot tower antenna wired for a variety of radio signals, with built-in redundancies.
The attached three-bay garage was a pre-existing structure that was renovated to meet the needs set by EMA. It now acts as a mobile command post and houses emergency response vehicles, as well as equipment used for hazardous materials response, urban rescue, incident management and public health and medical supplies. It also has a handy pull-through bay.
“Say something happens and we want to do a point of dispensing – so whether food, MREs, medical equipment or something like vaccination clinics, or other things – literally, a car can pull through the gate, come around back, pull into the bay, we issue the food, water, whatever service we’re providing, and they go out the front bay, and out to state Route 59,” Shackelford said. “It’s kind of built so that we can do that distribution.”
