[Scan-DC] New 911 center critical to upgrading Washington County emergency communications

[Alan Henney]

http://www.herald-mail.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=199086&format=html

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A new radio tower is seen Wednesday behind the main building being
renovated for Washington County’s new 911 center near Williamsport.
(Credit: By Colleen Helf / Staff Photographer)



Allan Platou installs lighting Wednesday in Washington County’s new
911 center near Williamsport. (Credit: By Colleen Helf / Staff
Photographer)


07/19/2008
New 911 center critical to upgrading Washington County emergency
communications
By JOSHUA BOWMAN
joshua.bowman at herald-mail.com

WASHINGTON COUNTY — It is a building under construction, full of dust,
ladders and boxes of unpacked equipment.

Electrical wires are draped over wooden beams, and empty soda bottles
and sandwich wrappers litter the floor.

At this time next year, however, the rear half of Washington County’s
Environmental Management office on Elliott Parkway will be the county’
s hub of 911 communications.

“This is what we call the master-prime site,” said Washington County
Public Works Director Joseph Kroboth III, who is overseeing the
construction. “It’s where everything will be controlled.”

The new 911 center is a small, but crucial part of the county’s $27
million effort to consolidate its radio communications system.

When the consolidation is finished, police, firefighters and rescue
personnel from different agencies will be able to talk to each other
over their radios, which cannot be done now.

The digital communications system will use 10 towers, most of which
will be around 190 feet tall.

An existing 300-foot state tower near the Md. 65 and Interstate 70
interchange will be used for the system.

The main tower at Elliott Parkway, which has been built, stands at 330
feet.

All of the towers will house not only antennas for the county’s
system, but antennas for a recently announced statewide communications
system as well.

Because the state will be using the towers, it has paid about half of
the $3.5 million needed to build the tower sites, Kroboth said.

The new dispatch center will cost about $2.2 million. The result will
change the way public safety workers are called to emergencies.

Instead of dispatching by department, the 12 dispatchers at the center
will be able to send the closest or most available units to an
emergency, whether those units work for the city, county or state.

That freedom will quicken response times and potentially save lives,
officials said.

“It’s really a matter of efficiency,” Washington County Sheriff
Douglas W. Mullendore said.

Mullendore recalled a situation last month in which the sheriff’s
department responded to an automatic burglar alarm at a business at
the same time that Maryland State Police were called by the business
owner, who was chasing the suspect.

The two police agencies did not know what the other one was doing for
about 20 minutes, Mullendore said.

“That will not happen when we have all the dispatchers together,
taking calls and sending units out,” Mullendore said.

Currently, there are four dispatch centers in Washington County — one
each for the sheriff’s department, Hagerstown Police Department,
Washington County Emergency Services and Maryland State Police.

Three of those centers will be combined at Elliott Parkway when
construction there is finished later this year.

Maryland State Police will keep its dispatch center, though
dispatchers at Elliott Parkway will be able to send state police to
emergency calls as well.

The new center will be a significant improvement over current centers,
Kroboth and others have said.

Washington County Emergency Services uses a basement room at 33 W.
Washington St. that is about one-sixth the size of the new dispatch
room.

“No windows, no real contact with the outside world,” Kroboth said of
the current center.

The new dispatch room is lined wall to wall with large, bulletproof
windows and equipped with racks that will hold several large-screen
monitors so dispatchers can track calls.

Lockers, a vending area and a large break room will make shifts more
comfortable for dispatchers, who sometimes cannot leave work.

Adjacent to the dispatch room is a training room for dispatchers, and
next to that is a room that will house a full dispatch workstation.

That workstation will be used for one-on-one training or can be used
as a 13th dispatch desk if needed, Kroboth said.

Near the training room are offices for police supervisors and a
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technician, who helps update
address data for phones, which changes daily due to number changes and
disconnected numbers, Kroboth said.

In the basement floor of the building, the county is building two
training rooms that can be used by local volunteer fire and rescue
associations.

The classrooms, which each can hold between 25 and 30 people, will
give local fire and rescue groups a place to teach staff outside of
firehouses, where alarms and calls can distract from training.

“This is really important, to get training out of the fire stations,”
Washington County Emergency Services Director Kevin L. Lewis said.
“You won’t have people jumping to go out on calls, radios blaring and
all the other distractions that come with the stations.”

Kroboth said the dispatch center should be finished by Thanksgiving.

After several months of testing, the new radio system should be up and
running by next spring, Kroboth said.


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