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State-of-the-art HHS communications facility stands ready to help deploy and coordinate resources, whatever the need may be
It doesn't look like much from the lobby outside HHS secretary Tommy Thompson's office-just two adjoining doors that open with the flash of a security badge to a card reader. It could be a copy center or a conference room.
On the other side of those doors, however, is neither a Xerox machine nor a mahogany table for high-level government meetings. Instead the doors lead to the first HHS command center, a communication super hub where Thompson can literally monitor the world.
When he walks into the room he had built just footsteps from his office shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Thompson presides over one of the federal government's most powerful-and technologically eye-popping-tools for coordinating disaster response.
Visiting the HHS command center is a techno geek's dream. Situated on the sixth floor of the Hubert Humphrey Building about four blocks from the U.S. Capitol, the room immediately boasts a 10-screen "video wall" that projects an image 7 feet high and 24 feet wide. During a video conference call, several remote participants can be displayed at once, or a single image can be magnified to cover the wall.
Nine 60-inch-wide plasma screens on the opposite walls stand ready to show live news feeds from 4,000 media outlets spanning four continents. Thirty computer workstations enable staff members to listen by phone to the audio of any screen selected so as to prevent a crosscurrent of broadcast noises from filling the space.
In many ways the room is a snapshot of the central command post at NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain facility, the global-monitoring station tucked deep into the Colorado Rockies and set up during the Cold War to track intercontinental ballistic missiles.
To those who manage and work in HHS' command center, the mission they attend to each day is no less significant.
"The No. 1 thing we have to overcome in a public health emergency is communication," says Dean Ross, the command center's director. On this particular day the command center's screens display a detailed street map of the Houston area, which was preparing for the 2004 Super Bowl; a chart listing the most recent count of SARS...