Mapping of places matters to private security for two reasons – security officers may be given a name of a place or a geographical feature (if on a rural or large site such as the High Speed 2 train line in the shires) or officers may be giving a location to 999, such as someone on a bridge who is in distress or a potential suicide. Mark Rowe reports from this week’s BAPCO show at Coventry for managers of emergency services comms.
Numerous police forces are taking what3words – Kent, in coastal and rural locations, are asking people to report anything suspicious; if walkers or cruisers on the Kennet and Avon Canal need to report an emergency, such as someone falling in, the Wiltshire, and Avon and Somerset, forces offer to take what3words. Briefly, what3words has divided the planet into three-metre squares. For example, a bus stop in front of Ebbsfleet United Football Club’s ground in Kent, pictured, is ‘mice.branch.pies’. Such an exact reference may be helpful at such sites where it could take first responders several minutes, having attended, to reach the exact spot of an incident, or earlier to drive to the side of the ground nearest to the incident.
What if for whatever reason – it’s dark, you feel unable to use your mobile phone to come up with the what3words, or you haven’t heard of it – you have rung 999 and give the location? My geography teacher once reckoned that the thing to ask for and go by was the nearest pub – everyone could tell you it, or could recognise it. However, many pubs have closed since. The tool available to the emergency services is searchable (phonetically) for even vernacular place names for a rock, or bridge or dip in the road, that only locals use (including Welsh and Gaelic).
This is part of the PSG (Public Services Geospatial Agreement) as described by Dr Egbe Manners, product manager at the Ordnance Survey. Long gone are the days of the OS only doing paper maps; it curates 20,000 changes a day to its database of 500 million geographical features in England, Scotland and Wales. The OS has surveyors going around the country capturing changes to buildings, roads and the landscape. A ten-year PSGA contract began in 2020, giving access to such data free at the point of use. Data including the number of floors to a building; the make of construction; if the roof has solar panels; any tram tracks, or average speed limits. Agencies can share data; customers can design their own packages. About to be released is ESG (Emergency Services Gazetteer), to be published monthly.
Every feature in the gazetteer – rocks, waterfalls, the corner of High Street and Station Street – will have an identifier, as increasingly used by the 999 services, whether for response, or for the recording of road traffic incidents. What matters here is a standard way of identifying junctions of two or more roads, of interest also to the Ministry of Defence (for its firing ranges, say) and the Met Office (let’s say, in a chemical explosion, responders will want to know the direction of wind, to inform which streets and districts they will inform and may evacuate, which will influence where they position vehicles).
More on tech at the BAPCO show – including the latest from the Home Office on the much-delayed ESN (Emergency Services Network), and how Humberside Fire and Rescue Service handled a cyber attack on its IT in 2022 – in the April print edition of Professional Security Magazine.
