Bayswater Disaster Response Team (BDRT)
BE PREPARED
The mission of the Bayswater Disaster Response Team (BDRT) is to harness the power of every individual through education, training, and volunteer service to make communities safer, stronger, and better prepared to respond to the threats of natural disasters, terrorism, crime, and public health issues.
• Personal responsibility: Public education and outreach efforts will convey the importance of individual actions, such as developing a household disaster plan and disaster supplies kits for home, work and car; observing home health and safety practices; implementing disaster mitigation measures; and participating in crime prevention and reporting.
• Training: Taking classes in emergency preparedness, response capabilities, first aid, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), fire suppression, and search and rescue procedures.
• Volunteer service: Engaging individuals in volunteer activities that support first responders, disaster relief groups, and community safety organizations. Everyone can do something to support local law enforcement, fire, emergency medical services, community public health efforts, and the four stages of emergency management: preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery.
• Electronic Neighborhood Watch: Codenamed "BaysWatch", we maintain a growing network of public facing CCTV cameras that leverage individual homes to support the communication and power requirements of the network. Read more about that initiative below...
BAYSWATCH
BAYSWATCH ELECTRONIC NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
Established in 2011, BaysWatch was created as a community-based electronic neighborhood watch program designed to improve public safety through a shared network of outdoor security cameras.
THE IDEA
The project was inspired by the story of a child who disappeared while walking home from school. Investigators ultimately reconstructed the child’s route by gathering and reviewing footage from multiple local businesses, but the process took valuable time.
BaysWatch explored a more immediate and coordinated approach: a neighborhood camera network whose footage could be centrally recorded and reviewed when an incident occurred.
HOW IT WORKS
Participating residents installed off-the-shelf, internet-connected cameras on their homes. The cameras were directed toward public-facing areas such as streets and neighborhood access points.
Each volunteer household provided the camera’s power and internet connection, allowing the network to expand without requiring dedicated communications infrastructure at every location. Video was transmitted to a central recording system, where relevant footage could be reviewed following a reported incident.
This distributed design combined community participation, commercially available technology, and centralized recording to create a practical neighborhood-scale security resource.
A COMMUNITY-BASED APPROACH
BaysWatch was created as an extension of the traditional neighborhood watch concept. Instead of relying solely on individual observation, the program used networked cameras to preserve a visual record of activity in public-facing areas.
The project anticipated many features now common in connected home-security products: resident-hosted cameras, internet-based video transmission, shared awareness, and the ability to review recorded events across multiple locations.
For additional information, contact info@bayswatch.org.