PSAP Utility Bridge

Overview#

When a gas leak is detected at a utility substation, both the utility operations team and the 911 centre need to know immediately, but they run on separate systems. Similarly, when a 911 caller describes a power line down across a road, the utility dispatch team needs that information without waiting for a phone call between control rooms. The PSAP Utility Bridge provides the bidirectional event exchange that connects both sides automatically.

Key Features#

• 12 event types across electric, water, and gas utilities including gas leaks, downed power lines, and water contamination
• 4 severity levels: critical, high, medium, and low, with recommended emergency service mapping
• Bidirectional event flow between utility operations and PSAP/911 centres
• 5-stage event lifecycle: pending, acknowledged, in progress, resolved, and cancelled
• Hierarchical event classifier mapping event types to severity and notification requirements
• 911 call classifier using pattern matching to identify utility-related events from caller descriptions
• Event statistics dashboard showing total, active, sent/received, and critical event counts
• Severity-priority ordering for active event display
• Cross-referencing with outage records and work orders

Use Cases#

Relevant sectors include critical infrastructure, public safety communications, and utility operations.

• Alerting 911 centres about dangerous utility conditions such as gas leaks and downed power lines
• Classifying incoming 911 calls to identify utility-related events for utility dispatch
• Tracking emergency event lifecycle from detection through acknowledgement to resolution
• Monitoring active event dashboards with severity-prioritised display

Integration#

The PSAP Utility Bridge connects with outage management for event escalation and references outage and work order records. All operations are scoped by tenant and organisation.

Open Standards#

• GraphQL (June 2018 specification): all event queries, mutations, and statistics are exposed through a GraphQL API, allowing utility operations and PSAP consoles to retrieve and update bridge events using a typed schema.
• ISO 22320 (Emergency Management, Incident Command): the five-stage event lifecycle (pending, acknowledged, in progress, resolved, cancelled) and the four severity levels (critical, high, medium, low) align with the ISO 22320 framework for incident status tracking and priority classification across responding organisations.
• NENA/APCO joint standards (NG9-1-1 i3): events carry psap_call_id and psap_incident_id fields that cross-reference PSAP call and incident records using identifiers consistent with the NENA i3 call-handling architecture shared between 911 centres and utility dispatch.
• WGS 84 / EPSG:4326: incident location is recorded as decimal-degree latitude and longitude in the WGS 84 geodetic datum, together with an affected_radius_meters field, enabling interoperation with any GIS or mapping tool that consumes standard geospatial coordinates.
• OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v1.2: the platform's alerting infrastructure serialises utility-to-PSAP notifications using CAP 1.2, carrying the bridge's severity and event-type classification as CAP severity and event fields for delivery to IPAWS and partner systems.
• OAuth 2.0 / JWT (RFC 6749 / RFC 7519): every query and mutation is protected by bearer-token authentication; access is further restricted by a role-based ontology check, consistent with the OAuth 2.0 authorisation framework and JWT-encoded claims.
• JSON (RFC 8259): all event payloads, metadata, and API responses are serialised as JSON, stored as JSONB in PostgreSQL, and exchanged between the utility and PSAP sides of the bridge.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14