System gets unplanned test

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

As the list of Trumbull County communities giving thought to joining the county 911 dispatching service grows, the date draws closer for the county center to switch over to enhanced wireless 911 service.

On Wednesday, county commissioners approved a memorandum of understanding between the county and city of Warren for use of a $600,000 phone-switching and computer-aided dispatch system that is creating greater redundancy in the system.

By having Warren’s dispatch center and county dispatching center in Howland linked, incoming calls can be received by either center and each center serves as an automatic backup to the other.

That makes it less likely the system would ever go down, said Ernie Cook, county 911 director.

The month-old system had an unintended test run over Memorial Day weekend, when an overheated air-conditioning system at the 911 center caused the phone-switching equipment to go down.

The calls entered through Warren for a couple of hours before the county realized that its switching equipment had gone down, Cook said.

“Nobody noticed. It worked that well,” county commissioner Paul Heltzel said.

The systems now will have an alarm connected to them to alert workers more quickly that it has gone down, Cook noted.

The equipment’s cost was paid for with money from the part of the county 911 budget that comes from the monthly fees paid by cellphone users, Cook said.

The 911 center is on pace to make the switch to enhanced wireless 911 technology in September or October, Cook said.

That will enable dispatchers to track the location of wireless 911 calls to within feet rather than miles, which can be important when people don’t know where they are, Cook has said.

Cook noted the switch is long overdue since Trumbull is among only three counties in the state — Columbiana and Harrison are the others — that have not yet upgraded to enhanced wireless 911 technology.

A lawsuit delayed implementation of the service in Trumbull by more than two years.

Warren approved the memorandum of understanding May 23, Cook said.

Cook continues to have discussions with communities such as Newton Falls and Hubbard on whether they will join the county dispatching system instead of having their own dispatchers.