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Dane County Awards Federal Engineering Consulting Contract For Warning Systems
FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA, May 6, 2011 — Dane County, Wisconsin has retained Federal Engineering, Inc. (FE) to provide professional consulting, planning, and facilitation services for improvements to the County’s emergency warning systems.
Mr. Ronald F. Bosco, FE’s President, provided an overview of this project: “Dane County uses a combination of methods for alerting the public to emergency situations, recognizing that no one application can provide warning to all citizens. Warnings may include: tornado watch, tornado warning, severe thunderstorm warning, flash flood warning, 911 telephone outage emergency, evacuation immediate, shelter-in-place warning, civil danger warning, fire warning, civil emergency message, radiological hazard warning, hazardous materials warning, and law enforcement warning. Some of the alerting methods, such as outdoor sirens, are owned and operated by the County. Others, such as NOAA Weather Radio or local broadcast media are not owned by the County but cooperate in the broadcast of warning information. The County also operates a reverse 911 system for community warnings and notifications based upon geographic area, telephone notification of specialized teams and resources, and text-based alerting to TTY devices. In addition, email messages are distributed via the County’s email system to all County employees and approximately 1,100 outside subscribers.”
Mr. Bosco expanded: “The objective of this project is to guide decision-making and determine the most economical, effective, and reliable means for alerting the public to severe weather and other community-level emergencies in Dane County. This includes updates to the remote control system used to activate, test, and monitor the outdoor warning sirens located across the County. The project also includes investigation into the feasibility of integrating other components of the County warning system into a centralized control system.”
“This program involves a wide range of technologies,” indicated Mr. David Janda, Assistant Director, Dane County Department of Emergency Management. “Dane requires a consulting firm that has experience in each of the disciplines especially is the emergency warning environment. We chose Federal Engineering because of their broad background in communications technologies and past experience with warning systems similar to ours.”
Federal Engineering provides a wide range of design and management services in siren, wired, and wireless public warning systems. FE also assists in the design and implementation of PSAPs, ECCs, and EOCs.
As a nationwide communications systems planning and design firm, Federal Engineering develops voice, data, and video networks for a wide range of end users, including organizations in the aerospace, energy, finance, education, publishing, and computer services fields. In addition to its private sector work, FE has completed hundreds of communications projects for 30 state governments, as well as numerous local and federal government clients.