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Partners for 911

Alpena, Roscommon team up to create backup for emergencies

News Photo by Steve Schulwitz Alpena County 911 dispatcher Pam Susan takes a call at central dispatch on Wednesday. The county has entered into an agreement with Roscommon County that would allow for emergency calls from one county to be forwarded to the another if there is an outage. In the coming months, Oscoda, Crawford and Ogemaw counties are expected to be added to the agreement, as well.

ALPENA — Making sure emergency calls and responses continue during times when local 911 operations are down is critical because those calls can save lives, officials said.

To be sure 911 calls are received during an outage, Alpena County has entered into an agreement with Roscommon County which will allow calls to be redirected automatically should there be a system failure in either county. It is expected that three other counties could be added to the agreement once system upgrade work is complete.

Alpena County Emergency Services Coordinator Bert Francisco said the two counties were working on an agreement in December 2015, but then the coordinator position in Alpena was vacant for a spell and talks were tabled. He said talks with Roscommon County began again early this year and a deal was reached and approved by each county’s board of commissioners.

Francisco said intergovernmental agreements for 911 coverage are common in Michigan, especially in rural areas. He said new technology both counties have for 911 services allows calls to be automatically forwarded from one to the other if there is a service disruption.

“The benefit is it increases redundancy,” he said. “If our center or network went down, for whatever reason, they would pick up without any sort of pause or interruption. If I had to, I could send a dispatcher who knows the Alpena area to Roscommon with a radio and they could pick up and dispatch as needed.”

Francisco said Oscoda County’s new fiber system may be operational now and Crawford and Ogemaw counties should be soon. When all are are updated, those counties will be added to the agreement and provide more backup should things go south at one or more 911 systems in those counties.

As technology advances, Francisco said costly software upgrades are often needed and when that time comes, the counties can share the cost and each save a large amount of money.

Each county would pay 20 percent of the first 40 percent of the total cost and the balance would be divided among the counties based on population. Through that formula, a purchase that would cost each county $200,000 if done separately, for example, would cost Alpena County about $50,000, Francisco said.

“That is pretty significant,” he said.

Counties neighboring Alpena are still operating independently and lack the fiber and other upgrades needed to make them compatible with Alpena County’s system.

Francisco said that, when those counties are ready, the technology in place now will be able to fit them into the current agreement.

“We’ll be doing a network of five, but it can do more than that,” Francisco said. “Right now, those counties near us aren’t on the fiber network, but once they are, the system would handle them if they were included.”

The agreement is indefinite, but there is an opt-out clause, should one of the parties decide to exit the deal.

Steve Schulwitz can be reached at sschulwitz@thealpenanews.com or 989-358-5689. Follow Steve on Twitter @ss_alpenanews.

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