Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Yitzhak Aharonovich, and the Fire Service Commissioner, Chief Shahar Ayalon, inaugurated the fire-fighting layout’s national command center. The center was established at the firefighting school compound in Rishon LeZion at a cost of 4 million NIS.
The new command center was established within the framework of the lessons learned from the Carmel fire disaster. Its role is to centralize all of the fire service’s activities at the national level and present the fire service with a real-time situational picture.
Advanced command and communication systems have been installed at the center, and its personnel will be able to listen to all the communication networks of the country’s fire-fighting stations. Additionally, a Cisco switchboard which operates without dependency on Bezeq’s phone network, has been installed in the center, as well as a conversation recording system that is capable of recording everything that takes place at the command center.
A central arena will be operated during emergency that will collect information from every fire-fighting authority, allowing the operations personnel to provide a national situational picture to the fire service commissioner. The center also operates as a “smart house” and is protected against NBC substances.