Illinois village adds video to the emergency management toolbox

Safe Community grant helps purchase cameras for Crete's incident command trailer

It was a bitterly cold night about five years ago in Crete, Illinois, when a truck driver ran off the road on Exchange Street and rolled his semi trailer – which immediately began leaking its cargo of gasoline.

Soon, firefighters and members of the Chicago-area community’s Emergency Management Agency were standing 300 feet from the wreckage, trying to determine from a safe distance how best to react to this powderkeg situation – and wishing they had a way to view the scene close up, without putting emergency responders in harm’s way.

Today, with financial support from Enbridge, those emergency responders have such a tool at their disposal. Using $1,250 from a recent Enbridge Safe Community grant, the Village of Crete’s Emergency Management Agency purchased video cameras for installation on its Incident Command Trailer – which is put to good use at large-scale emergencies, as well as community events. The cameras allow first responders to zoom in on, view, and assess an incident from the trailer, parked a safe distance away.

“We can see further with the cameras than we can with the human eye,” says Marty Braccio, director of Crete’s volunteer Emergency Management Agency, which oversees all of the village’s emergency services. “For safety reasons, we might need to keep emergency responders away from the incident until we can assess the situation. The cameras will let us do this.”

These new digital eyeballs will also allow emergency services personnel to use the trailer as a command centre during a major incident. And after the fact, emergency response agencies in Crete also plan to use the video transcripts of real-life events as teaching tools. “It will be our best way to learn what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong, and how we have to correct it in the future,” says Braccio.

A portion of this Safe Community grant resulted from six Crete Emergency Management Agency members taking Enbridge’s online Emergency Responder Education Program. Based on curriculum developed by the U.S. National Association of State Fire Marshals, the program provides information on pipeline operations, hazards, and emergency response procedures.

“We want emergency responders to have as much information about Enbridge, safety, and our pipelines as we can give them,” says Shelly Iliff, an Enbridge public awareness co-ordinator for the Chicago region. “We know that in the unlikely event of any pipeline incident, whether it’s a pipeline release or medical injury in the field, those response agencies are assisting with their resources.”

Having a community partner contributing toward emergency response equipment and training is invaluable, says Braccio.

“We really appreciate how encouraging Enbridge is about providing training for our people,” he says. “The partnership is just a great asset to have in our toolbox.”