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In a report by The Daily Herald last Wednesday, Roanoke Rapids Police Chief Jeff Hinton was quoted as saying the new EMS system was not working as well as the old system it replaced.
One particular shooting incident in Roanoke Rapids was cited by Hinton, who said response by the EMS dispatchers was much longer than it used to be using the old system.
Brown brought EMS director Phil Ricks and Heather Joyner before the board Tuesday to answer questions raised by the newspaper article.
Brown said, “I've listened to both the tapes of the communications center and also of all the communications that took place between the center and the chief of police of Roanoke Rapids. From what I can tell, there is nothing out of the ordinary that took place.”
Brown said if one listens to any other communication call, it was handled in the same way. Part of the problem, Brown said, is that when a call is taken by the communication center, the clock starts when the call is answered. If the dispatcher has to listen to five minutes of hysterical explanation to get to the reason for the call, the clock is still ticking before a responder can actually be dispatched.
Brown asked EMS Director Phil Ricks to give the board an update on the progress of the ongoing change-over to the new system that was put in place on July 27.
“Just to give you an update on our E-911 center upgrade, July 27 was our cut-over date. We transitioned from our old equipment to our new equipment and that transition went fairly smoothly. We had some bugs that day, but all-in-all, it was completed by 8 p.m. that evening and all the new equipment was there and functioning,” Ricks said.
Ricks acknowledged there had been some bugs that have caused minor problems, but otherwise the changeover has been relatively smooth. He said they have been working with the vendors who sold the equipment to solve any problems.
“We've also been soliciting input from our employees, as to the new equipment; what they like about it, what they dislike about it, and we're using that input from them to make determinations on how we need to have the equipment set up.”
“Our Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system: we're still in the final process of finalizing our upgrades for that and we're in the process of getting those installed on the new server. We're still working with our old version of CAD at this point and once we get those updates in there, there has to be some training done for our employees to get them up to speed on that. (That system) should be coming up in the next two weeks.”
Ricks then gave the board an update on the radio communications upgrades. County sheriffs, fire, EMS, mutual aid and the county operations frequencies will have to be upgraded to meet new FCC requirements for narrow band frequencies. “Right now the bands are 25 megahertz wide and the FCC is cutting them down to 12,” Ricks said of the changes that must take place by 2011.
After a brief discussion of the change over to the new frequencies, the board revisited the problem with the Roanoke Rapids Police Department. Chairman Gene Minton told Ricks, “I received an e-mail last week from Commissioner Manning in regards to a local city government talking about the E-911 center and the response. It was very derogatory about what was said about you guys and immediately, I got with the county manager to express my concern.”
“He got a copy of the whole interaction from your center, so I could hear it for myself. I just want to tell you that your people did a great job. They were very good, very concise; they made a rapid response. It was not a slow response and I was very much appreciative of the fact that our center was right on, we did a good job. In that particular situation, they were perfect.”
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