E911 Supervisor Ruth Merritt and Director H.E. "Buddy" Glass show updated equipment being installed at Miller County Jail 911 office. Sheriffs and Fire Chiefs from Miller and other counties within U.S. Congressional District 2 were introduced recently to an innovative visual intelligence program. The meeting in Colquitt was hosted by Miller County Sheriff Buddy Glass and Fire Chief Craig Tully. The program is named Pictometry. Taken by air flights, digitized photographs of entire counties are made with sophisticated cameras and ultimately loaded into desktop and laptop computers for use by public safety personnel. The pictures are used by law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMS personnel and rescue workers to assist them as they respond to emergency situations. For emergency responders, "know before you go" sums up a key objective of the program. The photographic applications give users multi-dimensional views of residential and commercial property and critical infrastructure.

Responders who are not familiar with a given area are assisted instantly by accessing their computers. Any building, house, intersection, alley, manhole, or terrain in a county allows a user to instantly measure distances, heights and areas by simply moving a computer mouse on a display screen. The program is ideal for pre-planning of responder convergence on a disaster.

Ideal for surveying areas constantly hit by hurricanes and tornados, the program aids public safety officials in their search and rescue work as well as their efforts in mass evacuations of citizens. Interviews with personnel attending the meeting brought enthusiastic support from both law enforcement and fire service representatives.

A grant request will be made in Washington, DC later this month by representatives of the Miller County Sheriff's Office and the Colquitt Miller County Fire-EMS departments. The presentation will be made to Congressman Sanford Bishop on behalf of all emergency responders in the 2nd Congressional District.

Pictometry's pictures are high-resolution, oblique (viewed from an angle) and orthogonal (straight down) images that give the end-user knowledge useful in knowing what to expect before dispatching personnel to a hazard or crime scene. Some of the key applications are search, raid, and seizure planning, position surveillance operations, creating staging areas, accident reconstruction, preemptive and concurrent tactical planning, target hardening, crowd control, evacuation, traffic control analysis, historical archiving of pictorial crime statistics, pictorial references for court presentations, land/ air coordination in search and rescue efforts, setting up foot chase/crime-inprogress perimeters and positron surveillance operations.

The Miller County Sheriff's Department in conjunction with area counties is continually attempting to offer additional services to the people of this county and surrounding counties. This proposed service that Pictometry offers will help the department and the people have technology that will help this area the most in so many ways.