Dispatchers and emergency responders aren't always on the same page, due to transmitters pushing 50 years old and disparate alert systems at various fire departments. For a long time, this has been the case in Morris County, N.J., part of Metropolitan New York.

"We've been jerry-rigging and Band-Aiding things to get them to work," said Keith Heimburg, deputy coordinator of the county's Office of Emergency Management. "There were equipment breakdowns, telephone lines would be cut and dispatchers wouldn't even know it, so pages wouldn't be going out."

But those days may be forgotten in the next few years, according to county emergency management officials who recently unveiled plans for two critical upgrades to their communication systems: a unified alert paging system and a countywide 911 emergency dispatch network which could potentially support all the county's 39 towns.

Across Morris County, each fire department and emergency medical services site had its own alerting system and, in many cases, its own frequencies, said Scott DiGiralomo, the county's director of law and public safety. With a $215,000 boost from an Assistance to Firefighters Grant, the county purchased more than 500 pagers for firefighters to use on a unified alert-paging system.

"We set up a single system across the whole county," DiGiralomo said. "They no longer have to maintain their own infrastructure, and we can alert any fire and EMS (emergency medical services) agencies no matter where they are in the county."

The county is also moving forward with plans for a countywide 911 emergency dispatch system. According to DiGiralomo, seven towns were recently notified about their obsolete emergency dispatching systems and must make upgrades by 2011. Primarily funded by the county over the next few years, the project to expand a countywide network is expected to cost $27 million, he said. But the technology, he added, would allow the county to take over 911 dispatching duties for any towns that choose to participate.