LEONARDTOWN, Md. – The St. Mary’s County Department of Emergency Services is celebrating a major milestone in emergency communications, tracing its evolution from a modest two-dispatcher Civil Defense Emergency Control Center in 1954 to a fully modernized 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Center (ECC) in 2025.
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HAGERSTOWN – The night of April 19 inundated Washington County’s 911 Emergency Communications Center with a record-breaking 1,518 emergency calls over six hours as a powerful storm swept through the region with scant warning, causing widespread damage and prompting thousands of urgent pleas for help.
Telecommunicators are responsible for quickly assessing calls, coordinating multi-agency responses, and relaying critical information to officers in the field. According to the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), an estimated 240 million 911 calls are made annually in the United States, not including calls to non-emergency numbers and administrative phone lines. According to the same NENA statistics, about 80% of 911 calls come from wireless devices, adding to the complexity of pinpointing caller locations, understanding incident dynamics, and adding the possibility of text and video information for the telecommunicator to sort through.
New Mexico’s highest court on Monday clarified a question posed by a federal court about which law to consider when weighing an emergency dispatcher’s legal immunity from allegations of a mishandled 911 call.
In a unanimous decision published on Monday, the New Mexico Supreme Court found that the Enhanced 911 Act, “has no bearing on the 911 dispatchers’ immunity from liability for the allegedly mishandled 911 emergency medical calls.”
Children of Boone County’s public safety employees will soon have a new space to stay while their parents are in the line of duty.
The Boone County Public Safety Childcare Center will provide affordable, extended child care access to law enforcement and joint communications employees within Boone County government. Construction will begin in the summer of 2025 and is expected to be completed by the fall.
Enhanced 911, now available at a handful of emergency operations centers, could be statewide by 2026.
The surcharge on your monthly phone bill funds the service, which allows callers to stream live video from emergency situations. Callers who use a language other than English can also communicate with a text translator, using what’s known as “E – 911.”
