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By Kenneth Heard
Fairfax County, V Radio Center
When Izard County (AR) Judge Rayburn Finley’s grandson was injured in a four-wheeler accident last summer, Finley instinctively dialed 9-1-1 on his cellular telephone. But instead of reaching his county’s dispatch center some five miles away, Finley spoke with a dispatcher in neighboring Sharp County more than 25 miles away.
 Photo 9-1-1 Magazine Izard County dispatcher Shane Farmer uses Google Earth on his computer to pinpoint locations of 9-1-1 callers using cellular telephones. Access to online sites like that, in addition to the inherent capabilities of the agency’s new Vesta Pallas 9-1-1 system, give dispatchers an information edge they can pass on to responders. |
Because Izard County didn’t have Enhanced-9-1-1 service, cellular telephone calls were diverted to surrounding counties that have the service. Rayburn’s grandson was not seriously injured, but the response time was delayed as Sharp County dispatchers had to call Izard County to send emergency help.
Now, the rural county has joined the legion of other Arkansas counties in upgrading its emergency services. It will be the first time the county has any 9-1-1 service. In the past, emergency calls were fielded by dispatchers for the sheriff’s office, assessed by priorities and then sent by radio communications to whichever deputy was patrolling the closest to the call. Izard County officials have installed the AT&T Vesta Pallas 2.3 system and hope to be fully operational by the first of 2009, enabling dispatchers a way to handle cellular calls. The PBX-based system provides such services as mapping, incident tracking, Computer Aided Dispatch, digital logging, and third-party applications.
The system can also handle administrative duties such as receiving faxes, voice mail, prerecorded messaging, and routing. Dispatchers began training in the first week of October after the system was installed in September; AT&T representatives conducted brief, but successful, field tests to try out the new system a week later.
A majority of emergency calls come from cellular telephones, Izard County Sheriff Tate Lawrence said, because the county’s rural roads are well traveled.
“We’re a very rural county,” Lawrence said of the 13,249 who live there. “We’re challenged to protect the lives of everyone here. This will help us do that.”
The county hopes to add landline telephones to the system in early 2009. Horseshoe Bend, a town of about 2,500 in eastern Izard County is a retirement community; Lawrence said a 9-1-1 system for home telephones in that town will assist those with medical emergencies. The county received the Vesta system with a $100,000 grant from the Arkansas Commercial Mobile Radio Services/Emergency System Telephone Board.
Cellular telephone customers in Arkansas pay a 50-cent surcharge on their monthly bills to help fund such grants. The money is disbursed based on needs to counties which apply for the grants, said Renee Pressler, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.
“The grants have helped a lot of counties who couldn’t otherwise afford such services,” she said.
In a move to help strengthen the fund, Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel ruled in November 2007 that prepaid cellular telephone services had to pay the monthly fees for its customers as well. He ruled that “commercial mobile radio service included any wireless two-way communication device, including ... cellular telephone service, personal communication service, or a network radio access line.”
Of the 75 Arkansas counties, only two now do not have the Enhanced-9-1-1 system in place. Calhoun County in southern Arkansas plans on installing one in 2009; Newton County, one of the most rural Arkansas counties in the northwest portion of the state, has no plans for such a system.
In Izard County, four dispatchers rotate 12-hour shifts. A part-time employee and a jailer help during busy times, said Dispatch Center Administrator Cathy Schaufler.
The center averages only seven to 10 calls per shift, she said. But each call could be a life-and-death situation and time is critical, she added. “In the past, we’ve had people call and say, ‘I don’t know where I’m really at,’” Schaufler said. “They may be nervous, or hurt, or excited. We can pinpoint their calls without them stuttering around."In Izard County, cellular telephone calls were picked up by Sharp County to the east, Independence County to the south, Stone County to west, or Fulton County to the north.
“Our system was nothing more than a telephone system with caller ID,” Lawrence said. “This system will give us mapping capabilities, and we’ll send that information to our deputies’ computers in their patrol units.”
The Izard County dispatch room is located in the center of the sheriff’s department and the detention center. There are two terminals at a work station along with several video monitors that’s how scenes of the jail cells.
Dispatcher Shane Farmer worked at one terminal during a day shift recently and showed the locations of recent calls. The system incorporates Google Earth, a satellite mapping system that allows computer users to see actual aerial photographs of land. He zoomed in on the detention center and showed the winding roads that traverse through the county.
Dispatchers have already received some cellular telephone calls through the system. Cellular telephones that have service with AT&T and Cingular Wireless are already online, Schaufler said. Other services such as Sprint and Verizon are expected to be accessible by early 2009, she said.
The Vesta system was delivered to Izard County on September 11. It was fitting, Schaufler said, because the date and the service they added shared the same digits – 9-1-1. “I thought that was really appropriate,” she said.
The Vesta system is stacked on a six-foot-high metal rack in a storage room near the center of the facility. Schaufler’s office is nearby. She hopes to add digital recording equipment by the end of the year. The extra equipment needed to handle landline telephones can be added to the rack easily, she said.
Meanwhile, County Judge Finley is overseeing the county’s conversion to physically addressing every street and road in the county to be ready for the full 9-1-1 conversion.
“We’ll put every address on our Global Positioning Systems,” he said.” A lot of people have lived in [rural] areas here all their lives and they’ve never had street addresses.
“This is going to be a huge benefit for every person in our county,” he said. The county has more than 2,500 miles of gravel road, Lawrence said. There are only 10 deputies working for the sheriff’s office who protect nearly 550 square miles.
The county is diverse in its topography, too, he said. The White River, which is prone to dangerous flooding in the spring, edges the county on the west and south. Hilly terrain and lonely, curvy roads make up most of the county, making it rife for vehicle accidents. Deputies were delayed early this spring when responding to a vehicular accident because the caller did could not pinpoint where the incident occurred. A car traveling on Arkansas Highway 56 left the road one night in April, Lawrence said. A woman spotted the accident and dialed 9-1-1 on her cellular telephone.
The woman saw a road sign indicating the Izard County town of Franklin was ahead and mistakenly thought she was already in Franklin. Her emergency call went to Sharp County where dispatchers forwarded it to Izard County.
After searching near Franklin, Izard County dispatchers finally found that the accident occurred across the county line in Sharp County and notified authorities there again with the correct location. The vehicle’s driver was not seriously injured, but had he been, the time it took to sort out the accident location would have been critical, Lawrence said.
The new system would have greatly benefited Izard County deputies last February when a devastating tornado packing winds in excess of 100 miles per hour ripped through the center of the county.
Two people were killed when the twister struck Zion, about five miles south of Melbourne and the county’s dispatch center. A second twister ripped through Ash Flat and Highland in Sharp County, tying up dispatchers for hours.
“It was total confusion,” Finley, who lives in Zion, said of the emergency response. “It was awful. A lot of the [cellular telephone] towers were downed, but some people could call out.”
He said he drove the rural roads around Zion with a chainsaw, cutting toppled trees out of the way so ambulances and emergency personnel could drive to the scene.
“We were hauling people out of house one after another. Sometimes ambulances took two or three at a time,” Schaufler said. “With this system, when people call in trouble, we can find them,” Finley added. Lawrence said deputies’ computer terminals in their patrol units will be equipped with a program to help locate callers’ locations once the system is fully incorporated. The terminals will use both mapping and Google Earth.
“We’ll be able to pinpoint people now,” he said. “It will be one step further in helping our people.
“It will eliminate a lot of confusion,” he added. “Before, when someone called in, we would try to get them to describe their location as best they could. The problem was enhanced at night when everything looks the same.
“Now we can get there quicker and we’ll definitely save lives,” he said.
Kenneth Heard is the Jonesboro News Bureau chief for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of 9-1-1 MAGAZINE. 9-1-1 MAGAZINE is the magazine for the emergency communications and response industry, serving law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services. 9-1-1 MAGAZINE provides valuable information to readers in all aspects of the public safety communications and response community. Visit 9-1-1 MAGAZINE online at www.9-1-1magazine.com.