The Madison County 911 Call Center on Old Monrovia Road in Huntsville.Scott Turner/AL.com
To say people who worked at the Madison County 911 Call Center had their hands full during the April 27, 2011, tornado outbreak might be an understatement.
Just as a large tornado was taking aim on the Huntsville area that afternoon, another tornado was on a devastating path through Tuscaloosa near the University of Alabama campus.
Personnel in Huntsville were answering emergency calls from both Madison and Tuscaloosa counties. People were entrapped in homes, vehicles and buildings. In addition to tornado reports, there were reports of gas leaks, downed power lines and outages, traffic accidents, floods and injuries.
Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. alone, Madison County 911 Call Center CEO and Wireless Infrastructure Director Ernie Blair estimates call center personnel took more than 500 calls – a normal volume back then for a whole day – with about 400 from Madison County residents and 100 from Tuscaloosa County residents.
The call center answered more than 1,700 calls that day. As was the case with Tuscaloosa, many of the calls were from outside of the county, including Cullman, Hanceville, Blount County and communities south of Birmingham.
Related: Photos from around Alabama on that fateful day
“I said this publicly, we don’t think we mishandled or didn’t answer a single call,” Blair said. “We think we handled them all. We haven’t had a caller who said ‘I tried to call and you didn’t answer, and it just rang,’ or ‘I called, and you sure didn’t send the help we needed.’”
No matter where the calls were coming from, Blair said the Madison County 911 Call Center “can’t just let go of a call.”
“We’ve got to get it where it needs to go,” he said.
That was the case with the callers from Tuscaloosa.
“For the far away counties, we might have one number, the sheriff’s department, because we never call them,” Blair said. “All we had in Tuscaloosa was the sheriff’s department. When we called, it was either busy, or they would tell us, ‘we’re busy, hang up and call 911.’ They didn’t understand, we were 911.”
Blair, a University of Alabama graduate, remembered the university’s police department number from his time there as a student. Blair said the department was told about the issues in Madison County.
“The university said as long as ‘we’re not getting hit, we’ll take that information,’ “ he said. Madison County was able to pass the information along to the university police.
Hexagon system played role
The Madison County 911 Call Center partnered with Intergraph – now Hexagon- to implement Hexagon’s computer-aided dispatch technology in 1992. Blair said it helped the center navigate the chaos during the historic outbreak when Alabama was hit by at least 62 tornadoes in several waves. Those tornadoes caused catastrophic destruction in many areas and took at least 250 lives.
“It works every day,” Blair said. “It’s reliable. On April 27th, we had this wonderful system that stood up to it on our worst day.”
The call center handles all call-taking and emergency and non-emergency radio dispatching for Madison County and part of neighboring Limestone County. Calls come into the combined center and call-takers determine which agency to dispatch.
If all dispatchers are busy, calls overflow to other agencies to ensure a rapid response to emergencies. All dispatchers use the Hexagon CAD solution, which is integrated with several other systems, including a locator, phone system and a software system that provides scripted information to aid dispatchers in gaining information from callers.
Eight agencies dispatch from the combined center on Old Monrovia Road: the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, Madison County Fire Department, Huntsville Police Department, Huntsville Fire & Rescue, City of Madison Police Department, Madison Fire & Rescue, Huntsville Emergency Medical Services and the Huntsville-Madison County 911 System. Additionally, more than 200 mobile units are in use across these departments, connecting first responders to the CAD system and data.
“When somebody calls 911, we have the system in place in front of the call takers and dispatchers to receive that phone call and then really have three goals,” said Ben Ernst, vice president for Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure and Geospatial division. “We want to dispatch an asset, police, fire and EMS to the right location at the right time.”
The system helps the call center to determine who has jurisdiction, which agency needs to respond and the severity of the emergency. The data includes the history of the site for 911 calls which may assist first responders to know what kind of issue they are dealing with.
Changes implemented since outbreak
There have been some changes with the call center since the outbreak. It moved into its current location on Old Monrovia Road in September 2020. It is a 30,000-square-foot facility that is double in size compared to the center’s former location.
At the time of the outbreak, the different responding agencies were all on different radio systems, Blair said.
“Huntsville Police and Huntsville Fire were on a radio system, Madison had their system, HEMSI had their system, county fire, county sheriff, they were all on different radio systems,” he said. “No one could talk to each other. That was a real problem. … “Since then, we now have a radio system. We’re all on it.”
The CAD technology has also evolved with the advance in technology. Ernst said residents can now text the 911 center.
“Fourteen years ago, maybe that was just starting,” he said. “It wasn’t a thing like it is today. There’s a whole generation of citizens where texting is the primary form of communication. That includes communicating with 911.”
Ernst current systems can integrate cameras into the dispatching solutions.
“Usually, a big map pops up that a call taker is looking at when they are going through the process of listening to the caller and trying to get assets moving toward the response,” he said. “That map in many cases has the ability to open up a camera that might be very nearby the call for service. That can be a public camera on a streetlight, on a traffic light on a highway, or it might be a private camera. Maybe you have a warehouse district that allows their cameras to be accessible by the emergency response team.”
He said video integration is becoming very important.
“A lot of customers of ours are launching drones,” Ernst said. “They can do surveillance of an entire region.” He said that could speed up directing utility crews and tree removal crews into the most heavily impacted areas.
He also said artificial intelligence is also being used to divert non-emergency 911 calls “to allow those call takers and dispatchers to focus on the most urgent calls that are coming in.”
Blair said the call center is planning to upgrade its CAD system to the next generation of technology within a year or two.
The call center is focused on using technology to gather the information needed to improve the response from emergency personnel and educating the public on providing the pertinent information needed during a 911 call.
“The quicker we get that information, the quicker we can respond,” said Brian Flinn, the training, development and outreach specialist for the center. “A lot of times, seconds count. A medical call, a fire call, a very serious police situation, the times that we delay, the later the response. The delay in the response could be life or death. … Most people call us on the worst day of their life. We want to make the response as good as possible with the information that we have. We’ve got to get the right information.”
See story: Tornado memorials in Alabama tripled since the 2011 outbreak: Does your city have one? – al.com
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