Imagine gutting the interior of a recreational vehicle and converting it into a mobile command center for county officials to conduct onsite emergency operations.
That’s exactly what Annville-based 911 Rapid Response did for Lebanon County’s Department of Emergency Services (DES), according to company owner/founder Mark Sallada. The $300,000 mobile unit still needs additional work by county staff, but when fully operational later this year, it will be a mobile communications ops center for the department.
“We gutted and ripped out the entire inside. So we took the bathroom out, we took the bunkbeds out, the stove, the tables, took everything out of the inside,” said Sallada. “After we took all of that out, we used whiteboard material, we buy it in 4-by-8 sheets, and we lined the entire walls with it. Now when we did it, we took out all the windows and we put it in and properly installed it so it didn’t look like a hack job.”
911 Rapid Response staff also made a conference table out of aluminum and took portions of the existing cabinetry and bed liner and coated it to diminish its RV appearance.
“We didn’t want it to have that RV feel when you are trying to run a formal command center or running negotiations out of it,” said Sallada. “You want it to have a presence without breaking the budget.”
Sallada said some existing components were coated while others were made in the company’s woodworking department. The RV’s bathroom was converted into a server room for the mobile ops center.
“The shelving, other drawers, that type of stuff, was made here,” said Sallada. “We didn’t go to a hardware store to buy the shelves. We went with the most affordable solution to keep them at their budget.”
Sallada said he did legwork at the beginning and during the project at no additional charge to Lebanon County.
“I did this because it is my county, right?,” said Sallada. “I looked at probably 50 RVs online but I physically touched at least half a dozen in person to determine if they were a right fit or not. The one I found in (New) Jersey checked all the boxes.”
Those checked boxes included having the right amount of slide outs, being the desired length and having low mileage. “So it has those features, low miles (about 6,000) and is a 2018 (model),” added Sallada.
Read More: 911 Rapid Response hopes to outfit up to 500 vehicles at Annville shop yearly
Sallada, who is an active volunteer firefighter, and his wife drove to New Jersey to bring the RV back to Lebanon County. Sallada is a member of the Lebanon County Special Unit 66 (search team) and deputy chief at Bellegrove Fire Company.
“Their goal was a $300,000 budget, so a command vehicle, to build one like that in today’s world on a chassis, would easily cost $1.5 million, without question it would cost that,” said Sallada. “If I was to build something like that in my Vengeant Apparatus facility, we would be anywhere, easily, between $1.3 and $1.5 million. Their only solution was to try and repurpose something else that was in good shape.”
Bob Dowd, director of Lebanon County Department of Emergency Services, said he’s grateful on behalf of county taxpayers for the cost savings and the value a local company like Rapid 911 Response provided the project.
“The obvious benefit is that it supports our local economy,” said Dowd. “Beyond that, the short travel time to the 911RR facility not only made it easy to be involved in the project, but also made repairs and/or modifications far easier.”
Having the same company perform the work now and in the future also has its benefits, he added.
“Being able to have the same people who originally built the unit work on it later brings a lot of value,” noted Dowd. “Since they built it, they have unique knowledge that makes them able to easily support it. It’s also great to know that a lot of the people who helped build it will ultimately get benefits from it when it is up and running.”
Sallada said the back half of the RV was configured for dispatch personnel to be located there. That area has a sliding door to section off the front from the back. The front portion of the vehicle is where tabletop conversations can occur around the aluminum table, which has been provided with chairs.
Sallada said it wasn’t the hardest job his company has performed but it was an interesting one.
“RVs are put together starting at the frame where they put a floor on, then they put walls up, and then they put the wiring in and then they spray spray foam in and glue the insides to it,” he said. “They’re not made to be taken apart, they’re really kind of glued together. We couldn’t just rip it apart and risk structural integrity.”
That created some contemplation at the start of the project.
“We had to get really creative with running wiring and making it look nice,” said Sallada. “We also wanted it to be professional.”
His company also replaced the generator with a larger model to serve the needs of a comms ops center. The generator sits on airbags for support and cushioning while the vehicle is being driven.
“We custom designed those brackets off the frame rail to hold the generator. Our weld shop did all of that work for us. There wasn’t one thing that was hard, let’s just say it was interesting,” said Sallada. “None of it made us scratch our heads and say, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to do this?'”
It was the first time, however, that they retrofitted an RV, which Sallada feels makes the project one of the Top 5 employees have performed since the company was founded in 2009. They also mounted the radio tower system to the unit’s exterior, allowing a camera to be extended 30 feet into the air to analyze an area without getting too close to it.
“It wasn’t like we didn’t know how to do it, we just never did it in an RV,” said Sallada. “We had to take the things that we already knew how to do and adapt them to an RV and work around the RV aspects of it. That’s what was the hardest part of what we had to do.”
Nearly every department at Rapid 911 Response had a hand in this project – the lone exception being the company’s showroom since no weapons were installed in the vehicle.
“That’s another way we were able to save them money because we did it 100 percent in-house,” said Sallada. “We had 100 percent control of the quality, which is a whole different animal. There’s no one else in the county who can do this nor any other places on the entire East Coast that are available to do a project of this nature.”
Sallada said the vehicle is perfect for various emergency situations, whether a hazmat incident, weather event or when there’s calls to remote areas of Lebanon County where radio communications are spotty.
Additionally, if the 911 Call Center was to ever go down, this unit could be mobilized to run ops out of it, added Sallada.
“It’s a communications unit in a big spectrum,” he said. “There are some areas throughout the county that don’t have the best reception with the county radios. This unit gives them that ability on those kinds of calls to take into that area, use it as a tower site and give better radio communications to a poor reception area. Its uses can be for a lot of things, but it centers around communications.”
Dowd said comms installation is the next step for the unit.
“It needs to have all the radios, phones, and other communications equipment installed in it,” said Dowd. “That will probably happen by late spring/early summer. After that, it’s just a matter of getting staff trained and it will be fully deployable.”
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