Cape's new 911 center opens today

When Kim Conway went to work as a dispatcher for Cape Girardeau in 1983, calls to the 911 center were answered on large tan telephones, the information was recorded on index cards and call logs were kept with notebooks and No. 2 pencils.

As recently as Monday, when a call arrived, giving complete directions often included using a paper map and street guide.

The 911 center in the police station was shut down at 8 a.m. Tuesday. The new center will be in operation today. For the past two days, emergency calls were routed through the county's 911 center at the Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department.

Conway is the city's communications supervisor, and she shed tears when the day came to start moving operations of the 911 dispatch system to the lower level of Fire Station No. 3. Dispatchers in the new center will have spacious desks, five computer screens and a database that includes a mapping system to pinpoint where a call originates.

"We have been working on this for so long," Conway said as she stood in the middle of what today will become the communications center for Cape Girardeau emergency services. "I am in my 25th year of being in the little, small, cramped room that was our area."

That room, at the Cape Girardeau Police Department, had no air flow, no windows and was close enough to the city jail cells that noise bled in as dispatchers tried to field calls and dispatch responders. Dispatchers were forced to share desk space.

"You can't do the job when you are all at the same desk," Conway said.

The new 911 center was built into the fire station, which opened in August 2007 at a cost of more than $2 million. Equipment in the 911 center includes a new radio system from Warner Communications, purchased for $236,000 with money from the E911 telephone surcharge, and software from PlantCML purchased through AT&T. In all, the equipment in the 911 center represents an investment of about $1.5 million, said assistant fire chief Mark Hasheider, the city's emergency operations director.

Dispatchers will have at their fingertips a database that plots calls on a city map and displays that can relay information provided by the public. That will include such things as whether a resident is using oxygen, the floor plan of a business or whether a commercial structure has hazardous chemicals. Dispatchers can learn whether a location has been a regular source of 911 calls or switch the radio signal to a secondary broadcasting tower to reduce delays in transmitting information to responders, Hasheider said.

"That allows us to be more versatile in how we handle communications," he said.

Each work station can be adjusted so dispatchers who tire of sitting can raise the desk and stand at their posts. And there are windows so dispatchers don't feel like they are entombed, he said. "What we have found is communicators who have an idea of what is happening outside work better," he said. "It relieves stress."

In all, there is room for six work stations, including one for Conway. Large plasma televisions adorn the walls, allowing large-screen monitoring of call locations and news or weather broadcasts.

Much of the money for equipment purchases at the center came from the E911 tax on telephones. That tax, however, applies only to land-line telephones and is not collected from people who use cell phones or Voice over Internet Protocol technology.

When a 911 call arrives from a cell phone, Hasheider said, the location information is given as a general area based on the direction from the cell tower transmitting the signal. Voice over Internet Protocol users have to provide an address to the 911 center to be manually entered into the database.

Both issues could be solved with additional funding, Hasheider said. Cell phones, for example, can have their location pinpointed based on how multiple towers are receiving the signal.

It is up to state lawmakers to decide whether speedier response is worth adding the tax to cell phone users, Hasheider said. "What we are looking for from the state legislature is funding, a way to provide the service. The technology is there. The funding isn't."

The new 911 center has been designed for growth and with an eye toward being able to add new technology as it becomes available, Hasheider said.

"We are an information technology society," he said. "Everything is about communication. We are trying to meet those expectations."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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