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Newsletter: December 2001Municipalities are once again reminded that they will need to check the White Page municipal listings to ensure that the emergency number 9-1-1 is prominently displayed as the first line under Municipality. The administrative numbers should then follow. Example: Knox, County of- SHERIFF- Administrative.........594-5656 Municipalities that are serviced by a private telephone company, or have dial tone provided by a service other than Verizon, must contact the provider of your dial tone to have your White Page listings changed. The independent company will then be responsible for notifying Verizon of these changes. This review needs to take place as soon as possible as the new books will be published in April. Included in this mailing is a new informational sheet for each community to complete and return to the Knox RCC. Each year this municipal contact sheet is sent out so that the Knox RCC will have current up to date information on all municipalities in Knox County. Please take a few minutes to complete all the information and return the fact sheet. Your assistance in this matter will help us to better serve your community. Since the events of September 11th, the Knox RCC has been re-evaluating emergency action plans for communications. Since that time a new Emergency Action Plan for the Knox RCC has been implemented. The plan covers a multitude of situations that could affect the Communications Center. Some of the issues include loss of the telephone company switching office, loss of a private telephone service within the county, various degrees of outages, and total failure of the network or facility infrastructure to Telephone Company, or Knox RCC property. Action plans have been drawn up and are at each workstation in the Center. Personnel have been given precise written instruction in steps to take for each situation. State ESCB personnel have also reviewed the plan as well as provided a default site for each municipality in Knox County in the event of loss of local prefix service. What the loss of local prefix service means is for example: "354" for Thomaston/Cushing area gets dropped from the local CO, callers can only place calls within there "354" area. No calls can be placed outside of "354", including 9-1-1. When this situation arises, we have pre-determined locations where a 9-1-1 call will "default" to when the number are called. A dispatcher will immediately be sent to man the phone at the pre-determined location. A caller in Thomaston dials 9-1-1 during the outage. The 9-1-1 call will ring through as if there is nothing wrong with the system as far as the caller knows. The telephone network will be able to default that 9-1-1 call to a pre-determined seven digit number within the "354" exchange instead of to the PSAP, as the call cannot leave the "354" exchange due to network failure.The Emergency Response Center for 9-1-1 Enhanced is able to recognize the loss of service to prefixes, and will automatically route these 9-1-1 calls until the network has been restored. Attached to this newsletter is a copy of the local emergency call routing locations. Other plans in the works call for total catastrophic failure of the network or facilities serving Knox County. In the event the PSAP is rendered inoperable due to natural or other type disaster, backup contingency action plans with adjoining County PSAP's are being drawn up. This will allow Knox RCC to re-locate to Lincoln County or Waldo County and our personnel will be able to dispatch from that remote location. We in turn will provide the same service to Lincoln and Waldo Counties. There has already been one meeting held with Waldo, Knox, Lincoln, and Sagadahoc County to discuss these plans. The plans include mitigation and recovery efforts aimed at three main topics: communications, location, and data recovery. We need to ensure that each County can talk to the other via radio networks. Also, data recovery is very important. We need to be able to back load all the calls and radio logs that were created from the alternate location once the RCC is restored. Preliminary testing shows little or no problem with Lincoln and Sagadahoc Counties data recovery. Waldo County is still under investigation as they have a different CAD system then used by Lincoln and Knox. Radio testing seems to be going well so far. We are able to hit each other's repeaters with no difficulty. The next meeting of the Counties will be in January. More information will follow as the plans progress. Speaking of radios, we have received one of the two requested frequency repeater pairs. Some minor modifications to the base radio needed to be made due to the fact the only frequencies available now were narrow band. There has also been an issue with Motorola Minitor pagers. Apparently the programming software needs to be modified to allow the new narrow band frequencies to be installed into the pagers. Motorola states that the frequencies will go into the minitors with no problems. They state that it is a software issue with the programming software. With the new FCC frequency requirements that have been in the works for the past several years requiring all new equipment to be narrow band capable, it only makes sense that the pagers need to operate within these frequency ranges. It is anticipated that the new repeater channel will be up and running during the month of January. Once the repeater has been tested out, agencies will be cut over to the repeater one at a time, to ensure no communication problems exist. The 9-1-1 Council met on Tuesday December 11, 2001 at the Emergency Services Communications Bureau in Vassalboro. The following is some of the more important topics that were discussed in that meeting. There is concern over the staffing level at the Office of Geographical information office. Several of the personnel in that office that were assigned to work on the 9-1-1 project are starting to leave the department for other jobs. The main reason for the bailout is the near completion of the 9-1-1 project. Several of the staff is moving on to other jobs for fear of loss of funding for their positions at the OGIS. This is causing a slow-down of the maps coming out of the OGIS. There is a new pilot project that will be starting in Lincoln County shortly. The project will be to test a new mapping program for three months. The project will be over-seen by Bob White of OGIS and formerly employed by Plante Equipment. Bob will serve as project support for Plante. The project will test the cost savings of third party project support as well as test the performance of Map Star. The project is being conducted at the request of the ESCB to evaluate products to provide mapping to the PSAP's. The State ESCB has adopted the Red E Fox program for 9-1-1 education. Materials will be available to PSAP's over the internet so that training materials can be printed and copied locally, reducing costs. The State ESCB web page will also be updated with an interactive site for Red E Fox child education. The Red E Fox program is available locally through the KRCC. There has been a copy of presentations using this program in the local school systems in Thomaston, Hope, and Vinalhaven this year. At each location the classroom presentation was well received by school officials and the students. The presentations were done this year in conjunction with Fire prevention, but they can also be done as stand-alone presentations. Requests for these educational presentations should be made to KRCC Public Education coordinator Gary Peabody. He can be reached at 594-0677. A recent survey was sent out by the ESCB office in regard to Emergency Medical Dispatch. The survey results show that 27 out of 48 PSAP's provide 24/7 EMD. Of the remaining 21 PSAP's, only 4 others provide some trained EMD personnel, but not on a 24/7 basis. The main reason for non-compliance seems to be costs associated with training of personnel. The State has received information from companies interested in providing EMD training to PSAP's in the state. The State will continue to evaluate the programs and decide on how they will handle the EMD issue in the coming year. Whatever the program method chosen, it must meet DOT standards as a minimum. The system network update shows that all 48 PSAPS are up and running. There is still no PSAP in Hancock or Aroostook County yet. Plans are still being studied to provide the service to each of these Counties. There has been some minor problems associated with the 48 PSAP's since all have been on line. The problems are all considered minor in nature. The problems include erros in database information, electrical circuit problem at one PSAP causing loss of power to APU's, equipment rooms being too hot and poorly ventilated, and loss of telephone co switching offices. The new MagIC software is being installed. This software will allow the ESCB to look at the performance of all 48 PSAPs' performance. They will also be able to look at individual PSAP's and isolate individual work stations within a PSAP. Local PSAP managers will be able to access this data for local management issues. Call volumes, answer time, etc. are all types of data that will become available to the PSAP manager. The network also has the capability to look at a specific call and see what steps were taken to process a call, including every telephone digit and command entered into the APU by the dispatcher. This will be a tremendous asset in quality assurance and complaint investigations. There will be a 4 Hour managers training class on the software as it becomes available across the state. The software should be available locally in the next few months. The 9-1-1 network is receiving approx. 35,000 calls to 9-1-1 per month from a served population of approx. 1.2 million with just under one million telephone lines in service. These figures do not include cellular or PCS devices. In an attempt to ensure 9-1-1 coverage to municipalities, the State as a draft document for procedures to follow for Enhanced 9-1-1 notification for planned and unplanned outages. A copy of the draft is attached to this newsletter for your review. One other issue that goes along with the outage, is there should be an action plan in place for municipalities to notify the residents of an outage, especially if it will be an extended outage which affects 9-1-1 or their ability to access dial tone. The 2002 Communications operating budget was presented and passed on December 12. The only new additions asked for in the budget are a new Supervisor position that was needed to provide a better span of supervision over all seven days and overnight shifts. A new line item that has been included in the budget for 2002 in the revenues column that calls for previous year carryover. Any unexpended operating funds will be carried over into the next years budget top reduce the overall net budget. As director, I more than anybody, was unhappy with such a large single year increase in the net budget. However, the majority of the costs were driven by factors that I have no control over. The cost of doing business has certainly gone up thanks primarily to health insurance which went from $68,382 to $117,686! The County's overall insurance program was initially looking at a 43% increase, which was pared back to a 34% increase due to the County electing to go with a lesser coverage plan that called for more increases on co-payments to the members. Otherwise, this increase would have been another 9% higher. I would like to comment briefly on the topic of 9-1-1 Hang-ups and the importance of these calls being forwarded to agencies for investigation. When the Knox RCC notifies an agency of a 9-1-1 Hang-up, what has taken place is somebody has dialed 9-1-1 from a residence (or business) and hung up prior to the dispatcher answering the call. As soon as the last "1" in 9-1-1 is dialed, the call is sent to the PSAP no matter what the caller does from that point on. That is why a lot of the 9-1-1 calls are met with a busy signal when the RCC tries to call back to verify if there is an emergency. A caller may recognize the fact they mis-dialed prior to the RCC answering, then they hang up and re-dial instantly. An agency is not given a 9-1-1 hang-up until all avenues of attempting to contact the caller have been made. This includes re-dialing the number with no answer, attempting TTY contact on an open line, etc. Once an agency receives a 9-1-1 hang-up, a unit should be dispatched to the address to verify there is no on-going emergency. There has been some confusion that we are sending the officer to put the fear of god into the caller for placing a false 9-1-1 call. This is the last thing on our mind. We are simply requesting the agency to verify there is no emergency at the residence. If there is a habitual call volume from a residence, the RCC will advise the investigating agency of that fact. There has been some officers that have complained about having to go on 9-1-1 hang-ups. There has already been many examples of why we must go since the initiation of 9-1-1 Enhanced on April 11th. There have been several Domestic calls that have started out as a 9-1-1 hang-up. The response policy on 9-1-1 hang-ups is up to each agency, however, the call is still an unknown until proven there is no emergency. There will be a Dispatch Advisory meeting coming up in January as well as an Executive Board meeting. Among the items listed for the executive board will be the approval of the Knox RCC Policies and Procedures book that has been reviewed by the dispatch review panel and the Advisory Committee. The entire staff of the Knox Regional Communications Center would like to wish everyone a safe and Happy New Year. Linwood L. Lothrop, ENP |
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