Tickets CAD installation used EXTENSIVELY during Hurricane Harvey by our EOC when regional PSAP became inundated with calls.

[mike]

I just wanted to provide a real world use of Tickets during Hurricane Harvey by a large operation.  

I am the IT Director for a fire department in the Houston area.  I began "playing" with Tickets several years ago as a hobby project.  

Our fire department is normally dispatched by a regional PSAP/dispatch center.  Over the years, I have configured and built Tickets CAD and even a completely separate OpenGTS server to capture our AVL data into tickets.  

We began ramping up for Harvey Friday afternoon and I set up two dispatch positions in our emergency communications office (back up dispatch service) in anticipation of assuming dispatching responsibilities for our department.  

Saturday afternoon, the dispatch center began receiving calls for evacuation from across the county to the point that their daily average for new calls was approximately equal to 6 months of our normal run volume.  We started getting large lags from them and took over our own dispatch.  We ran our entire fire department, as well as several state and federal task forces and strike teams assigned to our department all through Tickets.  

When a new unit would arrive, we were able to build the unit and page calls to their cell phone within seconds.  All in all we had over 62 individual units/resources we were tracking and dispatching through Tickets.  

At one point, when a neighborhood was overtaken by flood water, we had over 100 houses to evacuate.  We built a new call for each address that called in and set the on scene incident commander up with the mobile version of tickets so he can see new addresses and add notes when they searched the house without tying up radio traffic.  We quickly became overwhelmed our selves, but luckily for us, one of the EMS supervisors used to work as a dispatcher at a very large PSAP that used a Tier I CAD system extensively.  He was absolutely shocked how easy it was to learn Tickets and quick the system worked.  He was most surprised about how little lag there was from screen to screen.  It took him about 15 minutes to learn Tickets and within 40 minutes was  a pro at it.  Between the two of us working 20 hours shifts for 4 days straight, we were processing calls nonstop and easily kept up with operations.  There is no way we could have managed this process without  a strong CAD system and Tickets worked great.   At one point, our regional radio system began to fail and we had to go to a SMS/Cell phone based operations for about 45 minutes.  Being able to send E-mail to SMS dispatches and messages through Tickets was a huge time savor.  Tickets worked flawlessly for the entire operation and I am very happy with all aspects of its performance.  

[mike]

I forgot to mention, Tickets was able to manage all our evacuation calls AND we used it to process and track and run all our 911 calls for service at the same time.  

[Arnie Shore]

Mike, "... 20 hours shifts for 4 days straight ...!"   Unsung heroes indeed!

Your words here have made our work over the years -- Andy's, mine, and some of you -- all worthwhile.

AS

[mike]

We were able to use just about all the features of Tickets too, even road status tracking (flooded streets) too.  I was able to train 5 people that never used tickets before how to use it in about 15 minutes each. 

[AndyH]

Mike.

This is great hat Tickets is able to help in such a dire situation. Seeing the news from the other side of the Atlantic, it is awful to see the devastation, although some of the stories of people helping each other are heartwarming. Thoughts are with everyone in the affected area.

BTW what version of Tickets are you running at the moment - you don't have to answer now, you have enough on your plate.

AndyH

[Lee White]

Hi Andy, I thought I would add the we are in the process of deploying mobile com centers for Texas and Louisiana. We will be using our Tickets CAD as well. Ours is connected to the main federal command center as well.

Lee White

US Coast Guard Auxiliary

Sent from my Google Pixel XL Android 7.0.1

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[Aaron McCann]

Lee;

That sounds like an awesome project!  I'm in IT for a pretty sizable department here in Arkansas and have been kicking around the idea of testing Tickets as we don't currently have a CAD system..

Sooner of our areas have radio logs they use that were built in Access years ago. All of our AVL info and citation stuff is running on a project called MOVE please out by the University of Alabama. Good enough system, but I'm dreaming of one day having the AVL and dispatching in one system without seeing hundreds of thousands on something like CompasdComm or similar.

On Aug 30, 2017 6:37 PM, "Lee White" <l...@cmt.comcastbiz.net> wrote:

Hi Andy, I thought I would add the we are in the process of deploying mobile com centers for Texas and Louisiana. We will be using our Tickets CAD as well. Ours is connected to the main federal command center as well.

Lee White

US Coast Guard Auxiliary

Sent from my Google Pixel XL Android 7.0.1

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 3:38 PM -0700, "AndyH" <harve...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Mike.

This is great hat Tickets is able to help in such a dire situation. Seeing the news from the other side of the Atlantic, it is awful to see the devastation, although some of the stories of people helping each other are heartwarming. Thoughts are with everyone in the affected area.

BTW what version of Tickets are you running at the moment - you don't have to answer now, you have enough on your plate.

AndyH

On Wednesday, August 30, 2017 at 6:20:47 AM UTC+1, mike wrote:

We were able to use just about all the features of Tickets too, even road status tracking (flooded streets) too.  I was able to train 5 people that never used tickets before how to use it in about 15 minutes each. 

On Tuesday, August 29, 2017 at 11:19:06 PM UTC-5, Arnie Shore wrote:

Mike, "... 20 hours shifts for 4 days straight ...!"   Unsung heroes indeed!

Your words here have made our work over the years -- Andy's, mine, and some of you -- all worthwhile.

AS

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[Aaron McCann]

Mike;

First off thanks for sharing and second thanks for doing your party for the people of Texas.

When you have a moment while you mind providing a high level of overview of how you integrated Tickets with OpenGTS?

All of our units are currently equipped with Sierra Wireless modems that have GPS functionally built in. 

Over the next few weeks, I hope to get an OpenGTS install running to see if I can pull in the location info from these devices.

Aaron

--

[mdtayl...@gmail.com]

Good job Mike!

As of this afternoon Montgomery County ARES is coordinating the recovery efforts by the volunteer relief organizations of Montgomery County. We are using Tickets to dispatch crews for cleanup, muck out, trash removal, and a variety of other things. We expect that we will be here for two to three weeks minimum.

Tickets is our primary dispatch engine.

Mark Taylor

On Tuesday, August 29, 2017 at 10:43:35 PM UTC-5, mike wrote:

[Kevin Reeve]

Thanks for sharing.  This is awesome.  And kudos to all on your team for their efforts to save lives.

Kevin N7RXE

--

[Arnie Shore]

Mike/all, let us know about any usage of ICS forms during emergencies.  Actual use, or potential if better capabilities were available, like a Save button.  AS

[mike]

Sorry this took me so long to reply to, been really busy :-).  

We are running Tickets version "Tickets Version: 3.12A Beta - 8/25/16

And we are using FastMail as our SMTP server instead of our Exchange server. 

We did have a few minor bugs, but nothing major.  

[mike]

We use OpenGTS for the AVL for historical records and TicketsCAD only.... We actually set it up a long time ago specificly just for Tickets.

For Live AVL, we use a product called Responder360 which is made by a developer at a local fire department, it works great for Fire departments.   http://www.responder360.com/

On Wednesday, August 30, 2017 at 8:04:02 PM UTC-5, Aaron McCann wrote:

Lee;

That sounds like an awesome project!  I'm in IT for a pretty sizable department here in Arkansas and have been kicking around the idea of testing Tickets as we don't currently have a CAD system..

Sooner of our areas have radio logs they use that were built in Access years ago. All of our AVL info and citation stuff is running on a project called MOVE please out by the University of Alabama. Good enough system, but I'm dreaming of one day having the AVL and dispatching in one system without seeing hundreds of thousands on something like CompasdComm or similar.

On Aug 30, 2017 6:37 PM, "Lee White" <l...@cmt.comcastbiz.net> wrote:

Hi Andy, I thought I would add the we are in the process of deploying mobile com centers for Texas and Louisiana. We will be using our Tickets CAD as well. Ours is connected to the main federal command center as well.

Lee White

US Coast Guard Auxiliary

Sent from my Google Pixel XL Android 7.0.1

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 3:38 PM -0700, "AndyH" <harve...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Mike.

This is great hat Tickets is able to help in such a dire situation. Seeing the news from the other side of the Atlantic, it is awful to see the devastation, although some of the stories of people helping each other are heartwarming. Thoughts are with everyone in the affected area.

BTW what version of Tickets are you running at the moment - you don't have to answer now, you have enough on your plate.

AndyH

On Wednesday, August 30, 2017 at 6:20:47 AM UTC+1, mike wrote:

We were able to use just about all the features of Tickets too, even road status tracking (flooded streets) too.  I was able to train 5 people that never used tickets before how to use it in about 15 minutes each. 

On Tuesday, August 29, 2017 at 11:19:06 PM UTC-5, Arnie Shore wrote:

Mike, "... 20 hours shifts for 4 days straight ...!"   Unsung heroes indeed!

Your words here have made our work over the years -- Andy's, mine, and some of you -- all worthwhile.

AS

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[mike]

I installed OpenGTS a while ago, and it was a major pain in the rear to install and configure.  I basically googled a set up document and followed it step by step.  

I have OpenGTS set up on Ubuntu Server, and TicketsCAD set up on another Ubuntu Server....  I could have ran them on both, but Tickets CAD is running on a production webserver we have and I didnt want to play around with OpenGTS on the production server.  Both run as virtual machines.  

For the Sierra Modems, we just put the public IP and port of the OpenGTS server in one of the GPS Server fields (There is a bug with the AirLink software where if you use DNS for the GPS servers, it can fail after a while and requires a reboot to start sending GPS data again).  We use the TAIP format for GPS to send to OpenGTS.... Server 1 sends to the MDT computer in the truck for our Tritech MDT, Server 2 sends to our primary dispatch center as a back up to the Tritech AVL, Server 3 goes to the Responder360 AVL service (as TAIP), and server 4 goes to our OpenGTS AVL server (as TAIP).  

We are looking at deploying some sort of radio based AVL system as well to help when the internet is down (like during a hurricane) and I have no idea how we will hook that up to TicketsCAD... I know they have an interface for MotorTRBO, but we will more than likely go with the Kenwood NextEdge system and will have to figure out an interface for that.  

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[mike]

I played around with the ICS forms during slow times, but could not get them to work right for some reason.  I could fill them out, and tried to mail them, but they never got delivered.  No error message in Tickets, the e-mails just never showed up.  

[Arnie Shore]

Mike, that information is a help; thanks  We'll include some test and confirmation features in the next version in order to help assure delivery.

The existing version sends the ICS form content as native mail data, rather than attached as a pdf or doc file.  Which works fine in GMail, but I dunno how other mail agents handle that. May need to go with ICS attachments, after all.

Motivation behind the current design is that it avoids the need for pdf or doc file handling capability in the mail agents at the receiving end.  But whatever it takes to get the mail through!

AS

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[Lee White]

The ICS doc work fine with out look and everything, tickets sends it out as an HTML email. Arnie, Andy, would it be possible to integrate Zello into tickets for radio/messaging/and tracking?  Zello has an apk and API available to integrate it.  Since this system is being used extensively for disaster communications, SMS, Distress, Video and pictures as well as GPS and voice.  Maybe have a second screen for all of those functions?

Lee White

US Coast Guard Auxiliary

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[Roberto Sanglay]

Mike,

I am also looking into this direction of using radio capable of GPS locations.  I am tasked to work on the Icom IDAS system into integrate into TicketsCAD.

I would love to collaborate and share details with you guys as soon as I get my hands on the rig.

Robert

[Lee White]

We are looking to intragrate DMR and Zello as well.

[mdtayl...@gmail.com]

We have Apex 7000 GPS enabled radios. The gps data is sent to our Traccar server where it is then picked up by the Tickets installation.

Mark

[Roberto Sanglay]

Mark,

I will probably follow your footsteps on this.  use the mysql database to sync location output from GPS enabled radio and let the Traccar code access the database.

I'm just hoping that the icom IDAS radio can spit-out to a MySql DB...

Anyone using an icom  IDAS radio out there?

Robert

[Chris Beresford M0TVA]

We did this using the Xastir table.

Motorola MotoTRBO radio with a modified version of the ARS/GPS server from here: https://github.com/KD8EYF/TRBO-NET

This writes to a Xastir DB, which is then picked up by Tickets.

We also did a similar thing with an interface to TomTom WebFleet which retrieved vehicle position data using the WebFleet API.

The Xastir option came about beforehand as it allowed APRS positions obtained from whatever source (but primarily local RF) by Xastir to be stored in a table which is then read by Tickets. Note that Xastir needs compiling with the persistence option for this to work.

One day, I'd like to find the time to get around to investigating more integrated working with MotoTRBO and possibly WebFleet - it should be possible to use text messages and responses to allocate jobs and record status updates. WebFleet offers full-blown job ticketing/orders as well.

[Roberto Sanglay]

Chris

Thanks for the info and pointing me to the right direction.

I have emailed David and asked if the program can be used with ICOM IDAS radios.

I am  also interested with how you tweaked the server program to be able to write Xastir.

I have a sample txt data stream from an ICOM IDAS radio. Let me know if you have time to check it out so I can send a copy.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Robert

[jbail...@gmail.com]

I am just joining, but I wanted to say thank you for sharing your story Mike.