Computers go online Jan. 17; other upgrades in the works
By Andrew Wellner
Anchorage Daily News (Alaska)
Copyright 2006 Anchorage Daily News
All Rights Reserved
WASILLA, Alaska — Since the start of the year, police dispatchers in Wasilla’s MatCom dispatch center have been tracking calls using state-of-the-art computers.
Meanwhile their colleagues in Palmer have muddled through with note cards, pens and pencils.
That’s all set to change, though, come Jan. 17, said Dennis Brodigan, director of emergency services for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. That’s when the Palmer dispatch center goes digital, he said.
“When it’s all done we will definitely have, between MatCom and City of Palmer dispatch, state-of-the-art facilities,” Brodigan said.
But when Brodigan says “all done,” he’s not just referring to the digital upgrade. He’s also referring to a troika of other major communications projects entering their final stretches simultaneously.
MatCom currently dispatches for Alaska State Troopers and Wasilla police. Palmer handles Palmer police, as well as all fire, rescue, ambulance and other calls for the borough’s emergency services.
Last week Brodigan was in meetings most days, talking with representatives of InterAct, the company providing hardware and software to the dispatch center.
The digital dispatch system will maintain a list of fire engines, ambulances and other equipment in the borough as well as a roster of qualified emergency responders. The data will be constantly updated as firefighters and medics train up to different levels of the profession or responders leave their agencies, Brodigan said.
Not only that, but the new system includes computer mapping, giving dispatchers the ability to see the best routes for responders. The maps will be updated, Brodigan said, with information about road closures and construction detours, of which dispatchers are currently notified via fax.
The system is paid for through a $494,379 federal grant the borough received from the U.S. Department of Justice, Brodigan said. Though it will be housed in Palmer, the borough contracts with the City of Palmer for dispatch service and the equipment remains borough property, Brodigan said. If the borough ever decides to change contractors or Palmer and Wasilla dispatch is consolidated into one center, the equipment will move to the new location.
As installation progresses through the next couple of months, Brodigan said, his department has to make allowances for three other communications projects. Radios installed in the new center have to leave room for Alaska Land Mobile Radio units compatible with a digital radio system encompassing the entire state due to go live in the borough in the coming months.
They also have to plan for the Phase II, a system that lets dispatchers know where 911 callers using cell phones are located. Then there’s the high-speed Internet connection due to run from Palmer to MatCom in order to instantaneously send information between the two centers. The data line will be most useful for 911 call data — data from telephone companies saying who’s calling and from where — which is currently called or faxed from Palmer to Wasilla.
It’s been busy, Brodigan said, but he’s happy to see all the projects moving along.
Still, “you have to be careful what you wish for,” Brodigan said.
And some of the real benefits of the communications upgrades may take time. One valuable feature of the new dispatch system, Brodigan said, will probably be the database it creates.
“The story I like to tell is that a few years back an assembly member had a complaint from a constituent that there were too many moose being killed a particular intersection,” Brodigan said.
The Emergency Services Department was assigned to look through records and see if the complaint held water. The process took many man-hours of looking over boxes and boxes of stored call reports. With the digital system in place, over time those boxes will start to disappear, Brodigan said. They’ll be replaced by a digital archive that can store years of reports that can be readily searched in a matter of minutes.
And that kind of data can be used to predict long-term trends. In other departments in other states, digital record-keeping has allowed dispatchers to accurately predict what parts of their service area will see high call volume and at what time. Brodigan said. Some departments have started staging equipment to anticipate flare-ups, he said.
A database with that volume of information will be slow to build, he said, but “by implementing the CAD system now, the system 10 years from now will be enjoying the fruits of the data that we’re collecting.”