911 upgrades

MOSES LAKE — Grant County’s Multi-Agency Communications Center fielded a record number of calls in May — over 10,000 for the month — according to MACC Technical Services Manager Gerrit Klein.

“On the 28th (of May), we, for the first time in our history, surpassed 10,000 calls for service in one month. Our computers actually crashed,” Klein said. “We ran out of (case) numbers.”

Klein, speaking to members of the Downtown Moses Lake Association gathered at the MACC Dispatch Center at 208 S. Hamilton Road in Moses Lake for a tour of the facility, said MACC’s 16 full-time dispatchers are now beginning to average around 400 calls per day on some days.

“We’ve been in service since January 1997 and it’s the first time we passed 10,000 calls,” he said.

The problem caused by running out of internal case numbers was fixed within a few minutes, according to Operations Supervisor Amanda Scott, and 911 service was not disrupted. However, both Klein and Scott said some changes are coming to countywide 911 service, including allowing people calling 911 to stream real-time video to help emergency operators and first responders better understand a caller’s situation, and upgraded phone and computer systems that will place much of the data for the MACC in “the cloud.”

Klein said MACC’s new computer-aided dispatch system will require multiple communications redundancies — several fiber optic connections to data that is hosted on multiple rotating data centers backed up by wide-band cellular connections and a satellite internet connection likely coming sometime this summer. However, Klein said once up and running, it should allow MACC to run from just about anywhere, including a dispatch operator’s cell phone or an encrypted radio equipped with a SIM chip, in the event of a serious emergency.

“We’ve got 38 other counties (in Washington) watching us very close right now,” Klein said of the incoming computer-aided dispatch system. “We’re trying to design a system that when all hell breaks loose, it will not fail.”

Part of the goal is to eliminate the occasional landline outages that have plagued the 911 communications system both locally and across the state, Klein said, including three that downed the system statewide in 2022. The companies MACC is working with will have to guarantee 99.999% reliability, only allowing for 56 seconds of downtime in a 365-day year, Klein said.

As 911 emergency systems across the country move from dedicated landlines to voice-over-IP systems, which treat voice as data packets and route them in the same way the internet routes data, Klein said the options for how people can contact 911 in Grant County will increase. People have been able to send text messages to 911 for several years, and recently the county tested out the ability to receive live video as well.

“We had this call, there were a bunch of kids fighting in McCosh Park. And we got a live video of that fight in progress,” Scott said. “We can copy and paste that link into our responders’ computers, so if they want to see a live video of what they’re responding to, or even that nature of what they’re responding to … if they can see there are 30 kids fighting they’re going to respond differently than had they not known that information.”

“We’re one of the first 50 (agencies) in the United States to offer video over 911,” Klein said.

Klein said MACC will send out a text message with an internet link that the caller will have to activate in order to stream video to MACC Dispatch, and could be extremely useful in medical emergencies. The center itself will not have any access to a caller’s phone unless they allow it, he said.

Klein said distinguishing personal information, everything from emergency medical data to the phone’s individual International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number to someone’s physical coordinates, is regularly purged from the system in order to protect people’s privacy. Live links for video only remain valid for an hour, he said, and once an incident is done, as much data as can be is deleted from the system, he said.

“I’m pretty diligent about my privacy,” he said. “We take our privacy very seriously here, and I’ve got a strong philosophical view about that. I think a lot of us share that.”

Klein said many of these changes are expected over the next year, and come in the form of long-term contracts with companies that provide services rather than through the purchase of new equipment. As an example, he expects to budget around $600,000 per year for MACC’s new voice-over-IP phone system in 2024.

The agency receives its primary funding through a countywide Emergency Communications Sales and Use tax that brought in slightly more than $3 million in 2023, according to the minutes of the December 2022 MACC Board of Directors meeting.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.