911 OUTAGE STATEWIDE IN MASSACHUSETTS

[matt04]

I know with Massachusetts, as you said, if you dial 911 from a cell phone you end up at the state police dispatch center. In Connecticut, it seems to very the couple times I had to call. Once there was a truck tire and rim in the left lane on interstate 91 and ended up at the local police in a nearby town I was passing through and was transferred to state. The other time, I was in a town with its own police force, and ended up at the state PD.

In Connecticut, the local police were very quick to transfer you to state police as soon as they realized it wasn’t technically their jurisdiction/1st response area.

[matt04]

Consolidation of 911 services is fine, as long as it is done in a smart fashion. Using Massachusetts, as an example, you have medium to large cities, like Springfield. If you call 911 there, a police department dispatcher answers. If it’s for fire, they will transfer you to the fire dispatcher, same with EMS. Of course, they have multiple dispatches working. At least one, probably minimum of two are answering phones from civilian callers and entering information into the computer. Another one is relaying that information to officers, EMTs, etc. And responding to radio calls for things like traffic stops and what not.

You go to town that literally border Springfield that I’ll have their own police and fire departments. Up until a few years ago, they all dispatched themselves. That means, you would often have one person sitting behind the desk answering calls from civilians to both 911 and the nonemergency number in addition to responding to the radio traffic from the fire and police departments as well. Obviously, that was fine if you had say, a minor MVA.. however, if you had a major incident that pulled all the resources in that town to the call, plus mutual aid that person quickly got overwhelmed and definitely caused safety issues where they may not catch a transmission from a firefighter or police officer in trouble, as an example.

Sounds like that regionalizing to move their single staffed. Individual dispatch centers to a regional center where you can separate those roles make sense as long as you have plans and redundancy built-in, I.e. if there’s a major failure at the consolidated dispatch center, they can somehow take over dispatching at the local station

[Vermont Lt]

From the consolidation of having trained folks handling the call flow and dispatching out through the new facility (I live in one of those towns bordering Springfield!) you will insure better coverage. They will be better trained and less expensive.

My background is in call centers and I managed the consolidation of banking and cable company call centers. So, I am all on board with consolidation for the right reasons.

What happens now is that when you do a state wide system, the call flow comes into a single “switch”. In that switch the call is directed through caller ID to the “local” dispatcher. I think there are a few prompts to confirm where the call should go, but the long and short of it is that where there used to be multiple, indpendent phone switches…there is now one. And it’s likely not even in the state.

When I was doing this for a hospital network, the switch was in the Midwest and it served probably half a dozen hospitals all over the country. In essence, our local groups were “remote” groups on that switch.

This is where the “single point of failure” comes into play. There are multiple redundancies to account for failures in systems at the switch. But, one day we lost telephone connectivity to ALL of those hospitals because a back hoe operator 15 miles from the switch cut through a fiber optic cable that carried all of the traffic to that switch. We were down for a couple of hours with only emergency phones in ur switchboard.

I am not saying that is what happened here…but something “like” that happened.

Consolidation is great and it improves service, training, and cost per call metrics. But if that single point of failure is not addressed…you are susceptible to massive outages.

[matt04]

Some good insight. I agree that having a single switch or other point of failure needs to be addressed to avoid taking out the entire state. I remember during Hurricane Katrina, their was some data center in NOLA that managed to stay online for the entire storm and aftermath. They were in hi-rise in one of the higher elevations and never had floods.

They stayed online for days, using some bucket brigade system to bring fuel from street level up parking garage ramps, but were down to one provider as all the ISPs had fled and eventually they ran out of fuel. It took a few days, but eventually other carries finally got fuel trucks and techs onsite and the crew that stayed thru the storm was relived.