Christie® Extreme Series LCD displays and Christie Phoenix are helping to deliver emergency operations and information sharing at the new Lafayette Parish Communication District in Louisiana. Interstate Electronic Systems (IES) specified and installed the Christie solutions.
Completed in 2020, the new, 23,000 square foot location replaces its former location in the basement of the Lafayette Parish Courthouse. The new emergency operations centre (EOC) provides emergency services, including a 911 communications centre, for Lafayette Parish residents.
“We house the emergency operations centre here. Any time we have an incident, officials come to the building and get the information they need to make informed decisions for the people of Lafayette Parish,” says Craig Stansbury, Homeland Security/911 Director, Lafayette Parish. “After an incident, like a hurricane, this is where we would meet and assess the damages and respond accordingly. We collect damage assessment information and we forward that information over to the State of Louisiana who in turn forwards to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).”
After looking at other facilities around the country, Stansbury and his team had a good idea of what they wanted in a new AV system. IES selected and installed 60 Christie Extreme Series 55-inch LCD panels, with a narrow 1.7mm combined bezel width, throughout the facility including a 4 x 4 video wall in the main emergency operations centre with 2 x 1 displays mounted along the side walls of the centre. Four 2 x 2 displays are in the 911 operations centre. Additional displays are installed in the Director and Assistant Director’s offices, as well as the conference room. Christie Phoenix, and Phoenix Quad-T for additional 4K inputs, were installed to control the system.
“We chose Christie Phoenix because of its ‘distributed architecture’, which allowed us to build in redundancy with multiple processing nodes. Redundancy is essential in any ‘mission critical’ facility,” says Lloyd Francioni, managing partner, IES. “With other systems, if there’s a catastrophic failure, everything goes down. With the Phoenix, we can have a back-up node to take over processing. If it goes down, the worst you can lose is two displays, not the entire wall. We stress very highly with 911 and EOCs, you have to have failsafe levels of redundancy.”
Says Stanbury of the new system: “We can disseminate information throughout the building to different locations. One of the most important things is versatility – we can bring in different types of information. We have a CAD (computer aided dispatch) system through 911, and we can show through this system where all the police, fire and first responders’ units are on a map on our video wall.”
The installation was a success, so much so that other facilities that Lafayette Parish Communication District works with are considering Christie systems. “Our team worked very well with IES, and IES went above and beyond. They were a pleasure to work with,” says Stanbury.
“The AV system is the key to bringing information to officials, before, during and after an incident; it helps us to take care of the citizens of Lafayette Parish. It’s probably one of the most important systems we have to be able to do our jobs,” concludes Stansbury.
