The City of Vancouver deployed the Avigilon HD Surveillance System during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. According to the Canadian manufacturer, it was to provide situational awareness to city emergency management staff and the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) in their effort to maintain public order and safety at the main pedestrian corridors in the city’s downtown core.
Facing an influx of millions of visitors during the Games, the City of Vancouver recognized the need for a real-time situational awareness tool that could provide all agencies with an up-to-the-minute view of what was going on in key areas of the city, including Granville Street, Robson Street, and Hamilton/Mainland Street in the city`s entertainment district.
What they say
Kevin Wallinger, director of emergency management for the City of Vancouver, said: “The Avigilon HD Surveillance System is a powerful, flexible, and scalable end-to-end surveillance solution that gave us a birds-eye view of the downtown core during the Olympic Games, unobtrusively delivering the situational awareness we needed to ensure public order and safety while maintaining privacy rights. With the Avigilon surveillance solution in place, we gained faster access to critical information that we used to mitigate potentially difficult situations.”
Robson Street, Granville Street, and Hamilton/Mainland Street corridors in downtown Vancouver were monitored 24×7 using the Avigilon HD Surveillance System. At the Granville corridor, fourteen 5MP Avigilon HD cameras, two 11MP Avigilon HD cameras, and two 16MP Avigilon HD Cameras were installed at intersections for maximum situational awareness while PTZ cameras were connected to 11 Avigilon Analog Video Encoders for improved performance. At Robson Street and Hamilton/Mainland Street, a 5MP Avigilon HD camera along with additional PTZ cameras connected to 20 Avigilon Analog Video Encoders were wirelessly connected to several city-owned facilities where fibre infrastructure was available. The City also installed six 5MP Avigilon HD dome cameras with integrated IR illumination and nine PTZ cameras connected to three Avigilon Analog Video Encoders at two additional Olympic live entertainment sites. These installations were connected to the network via the City’s fibre backbone.
Emergency Operations Centre staff managed the Avigilon HD Surveillance System using Avigilon Control Center network video management software (NVMS) with HD Stream Management on five workstations and stored up to 21 days of footage on four servers. More workstations were set up at the Vancouver Police Department and the City of Vancouver Transportation Operations Centre for added monitoring.
The HD system delivered full situational awareness to the City of Vancouver and VPD at key sites during the Games, leading to improved communication between all agencies and the most strategic and effective crowd management possible. With access to real-time and archived events, the City was able to respond strategically to incidents and deploy only the necessary resources required, resulting in better public control and cost-savings. Managers also enjoyed faster access to critical information—receiving information at least 30 minutes faster than before—to proactively mitigate situations much more effectively than before. Avigilon’s flexibility, scalability, and intuitive software met the challenges of a complex and time-sensitive project, and could be easily adjusted to meet new requirements on the fly.
“The City of Vancouver set a new benchmark in large scale event management and public safety during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games,” said Dave Tynan, vice president of global sales and marketing at Avigilon. “We were told that the Avigilon HD Surveillance System was critical to the City’s ability to access real intelligence and ensure cooperation between all agencies for enhanced public order and safety. We are proud to have played a role in delivering such a world-class event.”
