Consolidation of regional 911 has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve seen.
A system like this should not get overwhelmed in one place and out all over the state. This is basic telecom 101.
Yup. They knew this 50 years ago when they were starting the internet — I’m sure the phone company knew if even before that. Here we are in the 21st century and putting all our eggs in one basket suddenly seems like a swell idea.
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