“When the public is having an emergency, we don’t want to be having our own [emergency] at the exact same time,” Kristi Merideth, Fairbanks Emergency Communication Center dispatch manager, said.
Fairbanks, home to nearly 32,000 residents, partnered this month with CentralSquare Technologies to use its cloud-based ONESolution platform. The move, announced May 13, liberates dispatch operations from being housed in a single location with a network of servers and equipment, all dependent on a power source and fiber communications.
A summer wind event several years ago caused power lines in the Fairbanks area to fail, Merideth recalled — which then sparked a wildfire, prompting local fire departments and other entities to answer. But the power failure also affected the dispatch facility when backup power options proved inoperable, prompting a number of communication difficulties among the very agencies responding.
“We had no power in our building. We were down probably four hours,” Merideth said. “Our whole center was down, with no power. And all the police and fire kinda had to try to dispatch themselves, or we were dispatching off of cellphones.” An earthquake last year caused a similar outage.
These events are made all the more significant when considering the emergency communications facility in Fairbanks is the dispatch nerve center — the sole point of contact of its type — for 22 Alaskan emergency response agencies stretched across a region the size of Maine.
Fairbanks is no stranger to the ONESolution platform, Merideth said. The city and the communications center have been using the technology for several years. What’s different now is the cloud component, allowing dispatch staffers to work remotely if needed. The cloud configuration, supported by Amazon Web Services and initiated in September 2024, allows the city to offload tech responsibilities like cybersecurity and routinely taking equipment out of service to CentralSquare.
The technology is “a fully managed solution,” Ashya Comes, CentralSquare vice president of product management, said, with high levels of security built into it.
“We have monitoring in place, both in the application, and the security side. And we’ve also got a dedicated security team,” which conducts audits and other security-related testing, Comes said.
The day-to-day emergency communications operations in Fairbanks are largely unchanged, Merideth said. But what has changed is the peace of mind a resilient system brings to an agency. The city department is freed from technology management and the anxiety around its failure.
“That gives me more comfort,” she said. “Even for my dispatchers, it’s the comfort of knowing we’re never going to be without this program, and we always have a backup. When we lost power we were having our own emergency, and then the guilt of not being there for everybody, trying to help them, is a lot.”
