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June 29, 2009

Dispatchers catch wave of the future with new computerized location system

By Cristin Ross

cross@jacksonvilleprogress.com

In a business where timing is everything, it helps to have the very latest technology to get first-responders to the scene of an emergency faster.

Thanks to a grant from the East Texas Council of Governments, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers now have that technology at their fingertips.

“We’re very excited to have this,” Dispatch Cpl. Mike Carter said. “It’s going to make things so much easier. A lot of times when something happens people won’t know exactly where they are located. Even when the emergency is on the highway, people who aren’t from around here won’t know where they are.”

The grant provided the county’s dispatch with the ORION Vela 2.0 computer system and hardware, which allows them to pinpoint the exact location to within 300 feet of an emergency call.

“This is going to be better for dispatch and the county all around,” Sheriff James Campbell said. “Any time we can save time in a real emergency situation is beneficial to all.”

Features the system provides include satellite imagery of the entire county; a color-coded map of all local fire departments’ districts; and distance measurements in feet and miles to the caller from a land mark or other point on the map.

“It even gives us longitude/lattitude coordinates of a caller, so anyone with GPS can go right to the scene,” Dispatch Sgt. Karen Gillioun said. “This is going to help us dispatch our first-responders out faster, especially our fire departments. Before we were using just a county map to locate where a report was coming from, then having to trace whose district it was in to find out who needed to be called. It all took time. This will give us all that information instantly, so that time is spent getting our emergency people out there.”

Gillioun said the system is also equipped to track calls from cells phones and is able to update rapidly enough to follow a phone’s signal as it travels down the road.

“It won’t work with pre-paid phones though,” she said.

All area cell phone providers, except AT&T;, are already set up to work with the county’s new system, and department officials have been told to expect AT&T; to be compliant before the end of July.

Dispatchers are also working with the Cherokee County Appraisal District and ETCOG to get the county’s most recent changes to its 911 addressing into the computer system.

“It’s going to take time,” Gillioun said. “There’s only one person each at the appraisal district and at ETCOG working on this. We’re helping by adding and making notes of incorrect or incomplete information we come across, and faxing it over to the appraisal district, but there’s a lot of changes to be made and we want to make sure it’s as accurate as possible.”

Campbell said he’s added the expansion of the dispatch office to the department’s upcoming budget, as well.

“We’ve been looking at making that office larger for a while,” he said. “There’s just not enough room for them to do their jobs really. I don’t know exactly how it would be done or how much it would cost, but we’re looking at our options and trying to see how we can get the most bang for our buck.”

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