D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday cut the ribbon on renovations to the city’s Public Safety Communications Center, a second 911 call center to ensure the emergency hotline infrastructure never goes offline.
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DC cuts ribbon on renovations to 2nd 911 call center, ensuring emergency helpline never goes offline
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday cut the ribbon on renovations to the city’s Public Safety Communications Center, a second 911 call center to ensure the emergency hotline infrastructure never goes offline.
The opening caps an $18.5 million project that included new technology and more space. The city knocked down walls to make the space bigger by 40%, according to Heather McGaffin, director of the Office of Unified Communications.
Previously, in the event of an emergency that disrupted operations at the Unified Communications Center, all of the necessary staff wouldn’t fit at the PSCC, McGaffin said. Now, “we can absolutely bring everybody here, including our partners from the fire department and police department,” she said.
A small team worked in the basement of the PSCC during the renovations. But within a few weeks, half the call takers and dispatchers will be at the site near Howard University. The others will be at the UCC in Southeast.
“It is absolutely imperative that 911 centers all across this nation have a secondary center so that 911 doesn’t go dark if there is an emergency,” McGaffin said. “We have come here several times for just that type of situation.”
Relocating the entire team isn’t a common occurrence, but it has happened, McGaffin said.
A few years ago, a fire near the UCC building caused officials to close local roads.
“At shift change, we were able to get here,” McGaffin said. “During major events, folks show up here if they live nearby, because this center can run in sync with our UCC.”
The renovated PSCC will run 24/7, “because if there is an emergency, it’s a lot easier to move half your workforce here than to try to move everybody here,” McGaffin said.
The embattled agency has filled 90% of its vacancies for both call takers and dispatchers. The goal, McGaffin said, is to always have “127 call takers, 107 dispatchers and 20 supervisors across the four shifts.”
Devon Williams, who’s been a fire dispatcher with the agency for 17 years, described the renovated center as “really high tech. It’s a lot of new bells and whistles that we didn’t have previously.”
The city’s 911 call center has been scrutinized for periodically sending responders to the wrong locations.
“The public is pretty confident in calling 911, as evidenced by the number of times they call 911, they know that they get help,” Bowser said.
Williams, meanwhile, said the city is changing and “the street addresses are changing rapidly, buildings are in places that they weren’t before. You have a lot of visitors to the city that don’t know what quadrant of the city they’re in at any given time.”
She described the challenge of the role as a “partnership between the call taker and the caller. Sometimes, the communication lines in that partnership doesn’t always work, but majority of the time, it does.”
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