Proceedings Of The Marine

WIN 2015

Proceedings magazine is a communication tool for the Coast Guard's Marine Safety & Security Council. Each quarterly magazine focuses on a specific theme of interest to the marine industry.

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39 Winter 2014 – 2015 Proceedings www.uscg.mil/proceedings The Port Fourchon Experience As the southernmost port in Louisiana, with its prime position in the central Gulf of Mexico, Port Fourchon is the land base that provides support services to approximately 90 percent of all deepwater oil and gas activities in the gulf, including the Louisiana ofshore oil port, the nation's only deep water oil port. After 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the Greater Lafourche Port Commission (GLPC) members realized that the commission needed to bring security, emergency response, and opera- tions into one common operating picture for greater situational awareness and interop- erability with local, state, and federal agen- cies. So staf went looking for command and control solutions to allow the port to be more proactive than reactive. In that search, GLPC members latched onto the concept of port-wide maritime domain awareness, and from that, Command, Control, Communications and Collaboration (C-4) was born. C-4 is designed to solve several business problems that Port Fourchon was facing in the early 2000s. These problems included: ■ bringing securit y, resilienc y, emer- gency response, and operations into one common operating picture for situ- ational awareness and interoperability with local, state, and federal agencies; ■ improving real-time collaboration with port tenants and local and regional frst responders; ■ creating a system that functions as an emergency response tool and can also be used daily; ■ bringing together the port's disparate data systems; ■ improving visibility across the port; ■ enabling port harbor police to access this data in the feld. As GLPC personnel attempted to fnd solu- tions to these business problems, they knew that the ideal solution must: ■ have a user-friendly interface; ■ support daily operations, while using the emergency response application; ■ leverage port security grant funding and meet national priorities; ■ improve communications and situational awareness among the port commission, its tenants, and regional frst responders beyond the port's geographic bound- aries; ■ leverage existing investments in tech- nology where applicable and easily upgrade where necessary; ■ improve understanding regarding the impact of a disaster through conse- quence analysis; ■ monitor trends to allow users to better understand potential event escalation; ■ provide mobile application support. C-4 The C-4 system provides a visual, geospatially based portal that aggregates all sources of relevant data dynamically to build real-time situational awareness. With all of these layers of data constantly avail- able to port operators and peak law enforce- ment and emergency incident commanders, it is possible to monitor port weather, trafc, and water conditions in real time; investigate alarms remotely via interactive cameras; deploy messages to vessel and vehicular trafc; provide alerts of impending hazards to vessels; and assist response personnel. The C-4 system also can be deployed on a video wall for emergency operations center support, or remotely from the Lafourche Parish government's emergency operations center building 50 miles inland. How does it work? GLPC's C-4 system was created on top of a commercial touch-assisted command and control system software package and lever- aged the Department of Defense plug-in called the Knowledge Display and Aggrega- tion System, which maps defense industrial base (DIB) assets, allows the operator to link external critical needs for those assets, add interactive vulnerability data, receive real- time threat data, and run on-the-fy threat assessments on potential DIB impacts. There are multiple components to C- 4, providing varying layers of access and func- tionality, and end-users are able to choose which layers they display. Components include: Integrated information: C-4 integrates infor- mation from individual data feeds and drops it in appropriate context into a single, dynamic display with a user-defned operating picture, or UDOP. The UDOP is geospatially organized, using satellite imagery, street maps, and other geospatially based reference material from a variety of sources. Single interface: C-4 uses the UDOP as the single interface for all critical information and alerts, so the operator's attention is not constantly rotating among separate stove- pipes of information located in independent computer screen windows. Automated alert notification: The system continuously scans incoming alerts for those that indicate the possibility of a threat and then brings that threat to the operator's attention. Interoperability: The system is designed to operate with all data feeds and other informa- tion sources, as well as with legacy software or new software. Information sharing: C-4 incorporates role- based access controls and other technologies that enable seamless information sharing among different organizations, databases, and jurisdictions without revealing sources, methods, or confdential information that is not relevant to the operator. Automatic status monitors: The system provides operator-defned status monitors that automatically keep track of the projected condition of individual assets, or individual missions, and indicate when the functionality of an asset or the completion of a mission is impaired. Multiple response capability: Should an inci- dent occur across multiple sites, the GLPC-C4 provides for multiple UDOPs that can be dedi- cated to response teams engaged in separate eforts. Enhanced field coordination: C-4 enables the UDOP to become a common operating picture, showing all of the critical information available regarding the challenge in the feld. Simulation engine: Using the data derived directly from the operating picture, the user can recreate the existing circumstances in a simulation environment, simulate the efects in that environment of implementing a proposed response, and evaluate the projected efects of the proposed response against mission objectives. Looking Ahead GLPC members are in discussions with the U.S. Coast Guard to deploy C-4 with the Morgan City Maritime Safety Unit. C O L L A B O R A T I O N C O M M U N I C A T I O N S C O N T R O L C O M M A N D

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