TRR photos by David Hulse Emergency control dispatcher Sandy Barry is pictured at one of the three consoles at the Sullivan County Emergency Control Center on the first day of "911" activation. (Click for larger image)

Post your address if you want it to work

By DAVID HULSE

WHITE LAKE - Police officials in Sullivan County say the addition of the 911emergency dispatch system that went on line Monday goes a long way toward combining the different police agencies, at least for patrol purposes.

In some parts of the Upper Delaware you'll hear horror stories about people waiting, literally for an hour, for police to appear after being called to an accident or crime scene.

Sullivan County Sheriff Dan Hogue says Sullivan County already has efficient delivery of law enforcement and now it's going to be better. In the past, police agencies had to rely on radio scanners to follow the calls of other agencies. Now they're all listening together. "The 'closest-car' concept is going to cut our response time in half," Hogue said at ceremonies marking the official kickoff of 911 on Monday morning.

"The perfect example was a robbery [investigated by the Sheriff's Department] in Rock Hill the other day," Hogue explained. "A trooper picked up the call and caught the perpetrator seven or eight miles away."

State Police Troop F Liberty Captain James McDowell agreed. "It's all like one big force now. Everybody knows what goes on... People don't really care what color the car responding is when somebody is breaking into their home," McDowell added.

Dialing 911 would have netted a response from the county emergency control center since March, but officials could not activate the system, because Bell Atlantic, whose phone network it uses, was not getting a high enough accuracy percentage from the data being supplied. So many seasonal phones changing numbers slowed the process. When the telephone company decided the accuracy level was high enough, they okayed the activation.

On an incoming call, the system provides the dispatcher with what amounts to an extended Caller-ID screen, which calls up another screen with addresses, cross-streets and the emergency services in the affected area. The appropriate services are either paged or toned out by siren, all from the same computer screen.

Sullivan dispatchers have also been trained to provide emergency medical advise over the phone and have recently been responsible for saving lives in choking and drowning situations.

General Services Commissioner Harvey Smith said the system cost a little over $1 million to implement since the idea was undertaken in 1994, all through surcharges on county phone bills.

"This is about the best center I've seen for the money," said Kevin Karns, who was appointed by the then county board of supervisors to oversee the project in 1995. Karn will now be moving on, leaving operations to director Dave Kimmel, who urged that the public post their addresses to help the emergency services and help county dispatchers by verifying the numbers in the system when they call for assistance.

You might be in the system and invisible, like one visitor at the center Monday. "You were there, but seeing the address depended on how your road name was entered," dispatcher Sandy Barry explained. " 'Route 97' instead of 'State Route 97' caused the problem." The database was corrected in that case, but Karns said there will always be new corrections and additions to make.

But Legislative Chair Rusty Pomeroy said even if 911 was six months late, Sullivan could be proud that some of the "turf wars" among agencies and emergency services that have divided other counties did not happen in Sullivan County.