Come heavy rain, flood, major multi-vehicle pile-up, or any critical emergencies, the UAE’s Ministry of Interior has been ensuring the security and stability of community members through a rapid response from its state-of-the-art federal operations centre.
The ministry’s high-tech mobile operations centre, which functions 24X7, keeps an eye out for any emergencies in the country and coordinates with police to handle a situation as per requirement.
The ministry has a satellite-powered mobile unit in each of the seven emirates. The movable operations centre is part of the ministry’s response system for emergencies, disaster management, and big-ticket international events anywhere in the country.
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The ministry, through its operations centre, keeps a close watch on any small emergency and proactively prepares a contingency plan before it even escalates to a severe level. With such preparations, the ministry always remains ready to react swiftly to a situation.
What happens inside
The mobile operations centre features three designated spaces: an initial monitoring area, a specialised space, a meeting room for decision-making, and one dedicated seat for IT staff.
The centre receives data from police command centres from all seven emirates. Inside the centre, six large screens flash live visuals of the emergency scenarios and give critical data on a developing situation.
Each of the screens displays different sets of inputs like drone visuals, CCTV footage, photos, voice recordings, statistics, and traffic situations to plan an efficient response. There are secured phone lines for communicating with police personnel on the ground.
Once the severity of the situation has been assessed, the officers in the mobile centre pass on the information to the decision-makers to plan the manner of response. The entire process of getting the first call and planning and coordinating a response takes less than 5 to 6 minutes.