By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
The Ellis County fire chief and emergency manager met with the Hays City Commission on Thursday night to discuss improvements to the 911 communications system.
The city has an agreement with Ellis County by which the city provides the dispatchers and Ellis County provides the consoles and 911 radio trunking equipment. Within the last five years, Ellis County has made a significant investment in upgrading not only the radio trunking equipment, but also the consoles and communication equipment.
The 911 system can now take information through voice call or text. The information for a 911 call shows up on a series of screens for the dispatcher, said Darin Myers, Ellis County fire chief and emergency manager. The system uses GPS to identify an area where the call is coming from. It will ping the phone several times during the call to narrow the location.
The county recently upgraded to an NG-911 system. Instead of having a standard phone line that comes into the dispatch center, they are all connected via fiber.
Emergency personnel are paged from two towers in the county via a data line. One tower is at 230th and Feedlot, and the other is southwest of Hays on Spring Hill.
The new equipment being used in the 911 center is more compact, but the county has retained the old equipment with the idea it might install it as a backup system in case the new system would ever go down, Myers said.
The Hays Fire Department is supposed to have a certain amount of dispatch circuits because of the numbers of calls it receives. The department has to have layers of redundancy to make sure the system is working. Before this year’s upgrade, it only had one. Now it has the required two.
Another upgrade was the addition of 4G-LTE backup so if the fiber line goes down, the dispatch center can still receive phone calls.
There is also now a backup generator and equipment at the north tower to help the equipment there last longer.
Further upgrades allowed the county more flexibility with the type of radios that are purchased.
“If we would not have upgraded that when we bought these radios, it would have limited us to what type of radios we would have to buy, which would have increased the price for each radio,” Myers said. “That cost would be distributed to everyone in Ellis County that uses it, including the city of Hays for the fire and PD and Ellis and Victoria PD. … It gives us more ability to buy a cheaper radio now to save money in the future.”
The county also upgraded its recorder. It records all its phone calls and radio channels.
The city has re-formed a joint city/county emergency communications group, which is developing a strategic plan for communications. In addition to identifying the importance of the continuance of the new group, the group identified funding, enhanced data and mobile data terminals as goals.
The upgrades that were completed last year cost more than $800,000. Radios that were approved for purchase Monday night would have cost $760,000 without the discount the county received. Myers said funds for future infrastructure improvements need to be identified.
Enhanced data uses GPS to help locate calls. The county is buying radios with the GPS functions, but money has not been identified for the infrastructure on the dispatch side. That upgrade would likely take another couple of years, Myers said.
Mobile data terminals reduce radio traffic because it uses GPS to automatically track emergency personnel. When personnel arrive on scene, the computer shows dispatch they are there and they don’t have to call in. It also automatically changes your radio channel so you are on the right tactical channel among many other features.