by Kate King
Stamford Advocate
June 29, 2013

STAMFORD -- As the East Coast braces for hurricane season, Police Capt. Gregory Tomlin can only hope his dispatchers will be able to answer all the 911 calls that come in when the storm hits.

Emergency calls overwhelmed the dispatch center's four phones during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, leaving 911 dispatchers unable to quickly answer all the requests for help. One man waited on the line for 20 minutes before eventually hanging up, Tomlin said.

"When you have 39 square miles under hurricane conditions -- trees down, wires down, flooding -- it seems like everybody in the city is calling," he said. "Even if we bring a full staff in, it overwhelms our ability to answer it."

That's because Stamford's emergency dispatch center can only answer four 911 calls at one time. Tomlin would love to have more phones, but the manufacturer who installed Connecticut's 911 system 20 years ago discontinued the equipment in 2008.

"Right now, no matter how bad the storm, no matter how bad the disaster, the total number of phone calls you can answer is four," Tomlin said.

Emergency communications technology and infrastructure is controlled by Connecticut's Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, which distributes the equipment to 106 dispatch centers across the state. The department allocated only four emergency call-taking consoles to Stamford when the city signed up for its Enhanced 911 system in 1989.

Enhanced 911 allows dispatchers to receive calls from landline, wireless or Internet phones. Only consoles designed to accept 911 calls are compatible with the technology. Municipal dispatch centers must purchase additional devices through the state -- they cannot just plug in spare phones.

Since the manufacturer discontinued Connecticut's 911 equipment years ago, it's impossible for any cities or towns to buy new phones, said Steve Verbil, the state department's emergency telecommunications manager.

"We simply don't have extra (phones)," Verbil said. "We wish we did, because there's lots of folks who would like more. We've been doing a lot of shuffling and inventing and squishing of the equipment over the years to make this work."

On an average day this is not a problem in Stamford, which fields about 5,000 emergency calls a month. But when a hurricane or blizzard hits the city of about 120,000 people, four phones just aren't enough, Tomlin said.

"When something big happens it severely limits our ability to ramp up," Tomlin said. "Between the March 2010 storm, Irene and
(Superstorm) Sandy we've been getting a lot of practice with large-scale storms."

Stamford's monthly 911 call volume jumped by more than 1,000 during Irene and Sandy, according to state statistics. Greenwich, Bridgeport and Danbury also saw spikes in emergency calls during those months.

Emergency call backlogs are rare in Greenwich, a town of about 61,000 which also has four phones at its 911 center, said Police Capt. Mark Kordick. Dispatchers did become overwhelmed last October, however, when their average monthly call volume doubled due to Superstorm Sandy.

Bridgeport 911 Coordinator Doree Price said she doesn't know of any dispatch center that would be able to handle the flood of 911 calls that comes in during a citywide crisis.

Bridgeport, which consolidated its police and fire dispatches into one 911 center three years ago, fields about 10,500 emergency calls a month using 12 phones.

"For the normal course of operations, I would say that those are sufficient with the call volume that we have," Price said.

"I don't know of any public safety answering point in any state that is really equipped for the catastrophic events. When you have a hurricane or a tornado of something of that volume you're going to be overwhelmed."

Danbury, which has six 911 phone consoles, has no complaints with its emergency communications system, said Fire Department Chief Jeff Herald. The city of about 83,000 receives about 2,700 emergency calls a month.

"We've never gotten to the point where we've been overloaded," Herald said.

For municipalities that are feeling the crunch, the next generation of emergency telecommunications equipment is on the way -- eventually. The new technology will allow 911 call centers to receive text messages, photographs and videos.

Connecticut issued a bid for the next-generation 911 system in 2011 and is still negotiating with a potential vendor, said William Youell, director of the statewide emergency telecommunications division. It will take a year and a half to fully install all the equipment once the contract is signed, however.

"I would like to see this thing start getting deployed in the fall,"
Youell said. "It's probably an 18-month deployment overall. But I can't commit to that until we actually get the contract officially completed."

Stamford and Greenwich 911 officials said the infrastructure upgrade is long overdue.

Greenwich, believing the new equipment would be in place years ago, installed six emergency call stations when it built a new emergency dispatch center in 2009, Kordick said.

"When we went to six positions we were perfectly willing to buy the additional equipment required," he said. "The problem is that the equipment used by the state is so old that it is no longer manufactured and as I understand it unavailable for purchase anywhere at any price. Accordingly, two of our new dispatch stations remain unused."

Tomlin said he would like to see Stamford's emergency call center equipped with a dozen call-taking consoles, like it was 25 years ago before Stamford started using the state's enhanced 911 system. Back then, citizens dialed separate seven-digit numbers for the fire and police departments.

"In 1989 every console down here could do everything," Tomlin said.
"If a console went down you could go to any other console to continue. I would like to see in the best case scenario us have 12 phones here. Worst case, I would settle for seven."

The extra phone will come at a price, however. The state has budgeted only six 911 consoles for Stamford when the upgraded system is released, Verbil said.

"They could ask for more, if they wish," he said. "There will be a cost, obviously, when we go above what we've allocated."

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