'When I got everything caught up and taken care of, it's like, whew!'
As they so often do, 911 calls came fast and furious on a recent weekday afternoon. A residential burglary. A business burglary. A person with a gun. They all happened at once, in different Evansville neighborhoods.
Amy Worthington was on top of it. Seated in the City-County Dispatch Center, with four computer screens in front of her and her headset in place, Worthington navigated Evansville Police Department officers to each event.
Officers were stretched so thin at the time that Worthington had to send two patrol units that normally work the South Sector out of their jurisdiction to one of the burglaries. It was such a busy few minutes that at one point, only three EPD cars were freely patrolling the city.
"That's what I just got caught up on," Worthington said moments later. "When I got everything caught up and taken care of, it's like, whew!"
Asked how she manages to handle such tight situations so smoothly, the 23-year dispatch veteran replied simply: "Years of practice. It's like walking and chewing gum at the same time."
Later that evening, heavy wind and rain rolled into the region, and storm sirens wailed. Weather events like those challenge dispatchers, too — requests for service pile up quickly.
In Worthington's line of work, slow periods are short-lived, and the next developing crisis is always just around the curb, presenting itself as a mere phone call.
In Vanderburgh County, 700 to 800 people dial 911 every day. Perhaps 10 percent of those are frivolous. All must be answered.
After many years with no capital upgrades, the Dispatch Center has finally reached a breaking point. Local dispatchers are working with console equipment that becomes obsolete at the end of 2017. Replacement parts will no longer be available.
Of even greater concern are "dead zones" in Northern Vanderburgh County, where neighborhoods, schools and businesses have been built but where sheriff's deputies, firefighters and others on the radio system struggle to communicate.
All of those issues are to be addressed in a two-year, roughly $5 million project, with two-thirds funded by city and one-third by county. Outdated equipment will be replaced, and a new tower will be erected in Scott Township.
"It's not something you want to do; it's something you have to do," City-County Dispatch Director Rodney Buchanan said.
The center has had system upgrades over the years — Worthington recalled many in her long career — but the upcoming one is perhaps its most significant overhaul ever.
Dispatchers, who use four screens, three mouses, a foot pedal and headset, will be trained on entirely new devices. Center operations, of course, must continue unabated.
Buchanan has been meeting with vendors about the transition.
"It's going to be a very interesting day when that happens," he said. "(Dispatchers) have been used to operating off this one console for the past 10-15 years. Now they'll have a new look, with all this new technology.
At the same time, Buchanan has worked more than six months on the new tower portion of the upgrade. Scott Township donated the land off Baseline Road, near the township's fire station.
The new tower required approvals from the Board of Site Review and Area Plan Commission, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration. Getting the latter agency's blessing was a 90-day process that just concluded earlier this month.
"That was one of our main hurdles," Buchanan said. "Simply because they have a structure in that area that is sensitive and used for flight patterns into the airport, and we were thinking there might be some interference. We had to submit paperwork with frequencies we're going to be using, to the FAA."
Once the new tower is online, it will accompany the two existing ones, at the Dispatch Center on Harmony Way, and off East Morgan Avenue near North Green River Road. The tower is to be built this year, but equipment on the tower will not be installed until 2017.
The three-tower simulcast system will foster better communication among dispatch and among all public safety agencies, officials said. Urban sprawl has made the "dead zone" problem more serious, according to Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding.
"I've worked at the sheriff's office 35 years, and in the 1980s we had a lot of areas in Northern Vanderburgh County we considered dead zones," Wedding said. "You could barely get a squelch. It was kind of dangerous, but you had minimal population and you could kind of get away with it. Now we have an urbanized area there. That tower is much needed and it's not coming too quick, that's for darn sure."
Under the current system, Buchanan said, "a lot of time (officers) have to switch radios, switch this, switch that. The new one will be state-of-the-art."
All mobile portable radio devices used by public safety officers throughout the city and county will either be upgraded or replaced by the end of next year. Identifying all users of those devices is proving to be difficult.
"When I say 'users,' I mean everybody who has access to our system," Buchanan said. "There's several governmental agencies and also some nongovernmental agencies that have access to it" —the two local universities and the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. would be examples. "We're trying to get an accurate audit of all the devices that everybody has. You have to get serial numbers. We're talking about 1,700 different devices — radios in the cards, portable radios officers carry."
Henderson County, too, is addressing end-of-life issues with its dispatch center and has scattered dead zones countywide. The city and county are spending about $7 million on a new computer-aided system and new portable equipment. As in Vanderburgh, the new system will help various agencies better communicate with one another, 911 Supervisor Mike Shockley said.
Technology upgrades will improve local dispatch operations, but 911 professionals also noted that trends in recent years, especially those related to cellphones, have made their job as tough as ever.
The importance of 911 operators was recognized during the just-completed National Public Safety Telecommunications Week.
"We get 911 calls from cellphones a lot when people put it in their pocket," Worthington said. "Even if your keypad is locked, it still will dial 911 because it's an emergency line. We have people who let their children play on their cellphones. All of this ties up 911 lines where people can't get through. I had a lady yell at me last week because I asked her to keep her child off her cellphone. She asked me to call the cellphone provider and tell them to take that function off her phone, instead of telling her to keep an eye on her kid."
Henderson dispatchers report the same problem. "If you have an old cellphone, before you let your kid play with it, take the battery out," Shockley said.
It's also common for dispatch centers to receive 20 calls about the same crash or incident when one will suffice.
"Everybody's got cellphones in their car," Buchanan said. "Sometimes people think you're not being polite if you just say 'thank you' and hang up."
Worthington said she still loves her work after 23 years, even though the call and run volumes have shot upward.
"I get very worn out more than I used to," said Worthington, who trained a newcomer recently while doing her normal duties. "Compared to what it was when I first started, it's night and day. It's a lot busier. And it's a lot more serious because of the way things are in the world today. Officers' and firefighters' lives are more in danger. Any car stop that we don't think is a big deal could turn into something at any moment."
Emergency operators, said Shockley, are not given much thought until that moment when they are sorely needed.
"Sometimes I think the public does take it for granted," he said. "... For us it's good to have the ability to help somebody in the community."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): John Martin
Quelle/Source: Emergency Management, 17.04.2016
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