US Capitol Hill Complex
Project Snapshot
- At a glance: A failsafe mass notification, emergency, and evacuation system for multiple high government buildings
- Operational since 2005
- Select Equipment: (1) 510ACS mainframes, (17) 8000 series announcement controllers with equalization and ambient analysis on each output, (136) 6270 amplifiers, (17) mainframes, (17) 6416S backup amplifier switchers
- Multiple layers of redundancy: User Graphical User Interface, Network, CPU’s, Power Supplies, Servers, Local System Nodes, and Power Amplifiers.
A communication and mass notification system unfortunately can’t
stop an emergency from occurring, but it can drastically help prevent its escalation and lessen its magnitude. IED is very passionate about keeping people safe, and work extremely hard to ensure utmost system reliability. This applies to all IED projects but perhaps none is a better example than the US Capitol Hill Complex, the large government area consisting of 14 buildings in total including the US Capitol, the Supreme Court, Library of Congress, and House and Senate Offices.
It was paramount that a completely reliable fail-safe system be used
for emergency announcements and evacuation of employees, officials, and visitors; in addition to day-to-day paging and announcement requirements under normal conditions.
IED was the perfect choice as it is recognized as providing the most
reliable large scale systems available. IED took these specific needs into consideration and developed a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use control method to initiate announcements and complex messages to various zones. It has customized incident specific messages for the wide range of possible threats and situations and delivers immediate high bandwidth, high intelligibility communication as traditional telephone or VoIP quality would not suffice. Finally, IED created a layered system for dependability without a single point of failure.
A series of control locations were installed to address all possible
failure scenarios. The primary networked audio and 510ACS core
controller has redundant CPUs, hard drives, and power supplies and is transported via the Capitol Police Physical Security Division Network for added security. The primary system is backed by a secondary analog wiring in the event of network failure. Each remote building is equipped with its own IED 8000 series node, which can control the system if the ACS has failed. An RF paging message interface is provided to inform staff and first responders. IED’s regular and continual testing ensures notification of potential problems before they can affect the system.