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Niagara County, N.Y.’s New Dispatch System Relies on Local Data

The county’s emergency planning committee has been working with community partners, gathering information to consolidate dispatch centers and enhance GIS capabilities.

(TNS) -- Picture being at the Fashion Outlets mall in Niagara Falls, N.Y., when something goes wrong, whether it be a health emergency, a crime is committed or any other kind of emergency scenario. A person’s first call would likely be to 911, but after the dispatcher asks, “911, what’s your emergency?” the next question usually would be, “where are you located?”

You stop to look around and tell them the store you are in front of, or maybe you are in the parking lot, so you tell them the store your car is near. But, unless you work there or have a familiar attachment to the business, you are unlikely to know the exact address or how to explain how police or fire can reach you.

That’s the same problem for emergency responders. They will know how to get to the mall, but are unlikely to know exactly where the store is located and what entrance to use.

But now, this concern has been eliminated with the implementation of the new computer-aided dispatching system installed at the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office on April 7.

The county was the recipient of a public safety answering point grant that came from the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. As an effort to assist in consolidation of dispatch and make system upgrades, $620,000 was given.

“The greatest thing with the new system is the enhancements it has brought to GIS (geographic information systems) capabilities and location mapping and identifying people and things in the field,” Capt. Todd Ostrowski said.

To achieve this, the county’s emergency planning committee has been working over the past year with community partners around the county, gathering the information to put into the system. Ostrowski said if someone calls from the mall and says they are in front of a store, the dispatcher now has access to a map of the building and can assist responders with what door to enter through and where to go once inside. This is also the case with all of the school buildings in the county. A dispatcher has the ability to pull maps up to get responding officers to the correct classroom.

“The stronger we build data and infrastructure, the better the response is,” Ostrowski said.

The new system can also help motorists stranded on the side of a road. If they get a flat tire or run into any number of emergency situations, it can be scary when a 911 dispatcher asks for an exact location and all they know they are somewhere near an exit.

Marc Kasprzak, senior dispatcher, said earlier this week a call came in where a motorist was stranded on Route 190. He said they knew they had passed a certain exit and were close by, but were not sure of their exact location.

Unlike their previous system, that required an exact street address, county dispatchers can now pull a GPS location from a person’s cell phone to find their exact location on a map. This also helps with identifying what jurisdiction the person is calling from.

“By far, a high majority of our 911 calls are from wireless callers,” Kasprzak said. “In many cases they know where they are. But if they are on the street and don’t know where they are, this allows us to use that pinpoint location we’re receiving from their cell phones.”

Ostrowski said the better infrastructure that they have within the center, the better their ability will be of respond “more timely and efficiently.”

“We want to locate these people,” he said.

The county’s previous system was installed in 1996 and was a DOS-based system. Ostrowski said it would have worked forever, because you could continue to put information in and retrieve it in a text format. But the information submitted was stored in an information silo.

He said one of the largest complaints about law enforcement, in the post-9/11 era, is the lack of information sharing with other agencies. The new Windows operating county system allows a “365-degree view of what is going on.”

If a person is being pulled over in Lewiston, the dispatcher is able to see this, along with other responders logged onto the system. They can also see the nature of the call and what is happening.

Ostrowski said if he was responding to a call at 123 Main St. for an issue about John Doe. He would leave an entry into the system about the call. In the future, if another officer is called to the same address or if an officer takes identification from John Doe, the information about the previous contact with police is available to officers. Fire departments can also see previous information about a location they are going to, to help with their call.

Though most of this information existed in the previous system, Ostrowski said it is now available instantly, where in the past a dispatcher would have to go find the information that was stored in the silo. It also helps to share information police officers previously stored in notebooks, kept in their pockets “for no one else to see.”

“The effort in consolidating information allows us to focus information to the appropriate responders and disseminate that information timely without having to go into a file to look for it,” Ostrowski said. “Timeliness is the most important and critical part.”

Other benefits to the new system include a better ability for dispatchers to send the closest car to a scene. Ostrowski said when a call comes in the location appears on the screen and the system gives a recommendation on who to send. There is also now the ability to enter any road blocks around the county, so the system can suggest a car that may not appear to be the closest, but because of the road block, it is.

“That’s how smart it is,” Ostrowski said. “But with that technology, it’s only as good as the data we put in it.”

This also helps when it comes to calls outside of the service area. Kasprzak said there are times when, because of cell tower locations, a 911 call comes in for a different county or jurisdiction that the county does not dispatch for. Now, because of the new map technology, they are able to see and pinpoint where the caller is at, and pass along more accurate information to the surrounding counties or the cities of Lockport and Niagara Falls.

On the fire service end of the system, last year the emergency planning committee and fire coordinator captured, by way of GPS, every fire hydrant in the county. So if a call comes in during the winter, dispatchers can pull up where a fire hydrant is located so firefighters know where to dig in the snow.

The system will also allow them to see what municipality is tasked with plowing a certain road. So if a call comes in at 2 a.m. and a road needs to be plowed, dispatchers can see who to call, as to not call the wrong municipality, Ostrowski said.

He said though it may be a county road, many times a town is in charge of plowing it.

The fire companies can also now place the information about fire inspections into the system. Kasprzak said if a call comes in for a building, this information can help dispatchers have the capability to see the building’s history, pre-plan information, design and layout. That information can be shared between both fire and police agencies so they have an idea of what the building they are entering looks like.

In total, 28 volunteer fire companies, two volunteer ambulances, North Tonawanda and Lockport Fire Departments and nine different policing agencies — Niagara County Sheriff’s Department, State Police, North Tonawanda, Town of Niagara, Lewiston, Middleport, Youngstown, Barker and Somerset — are on the new system.

Only Niagara Falls police and fire and Lockport City Police are not on the county dispatching system.

There are 32 people who work in the county dispatch office, including Ostrowski, three senior dispatchers, 22 full-time dispatchers and six part-time dispatchers.

©2015 the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal (Lockport, N.Y.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC