When Teresa Hill takes a call at work, she never knows who or what is waiting on the other line.
On Tuesday, Feb. 19, the Jefferson County 911 call center was relatively quiet — or at least as quiet as an emergency help line could be. Dispatchers answered calls about fire alarms and sent traffic stops throughout the day, but around 1:30 p.m., Hill got a call that changed everything.
An Albany man from Burma called 911 frantic because his daughter had been assaulted. Luckily, Albany Police Department’s newest dispatcher, Francis HungMang, answered the call.
It was his first week on the job and HungMang, himself a Burmese refugee, was able to directly speak with the man in his native language and assure him an officer was on the way. Typically police would have to use a language line to reach a translator.
WHEELING, W. Va. (WTOV) — UPDATE: Emergency officials say the outage has been solved.
Residents in several West Virginia communities are without 911 service Saturday morning.
According to emergency officials at the Ohio County 911 dispatch center, an outage from their telecommunications supplier Frontier Communications is causing issues for several counties throughout West Virginia.
Work continues on shifting Barry Lawrence County Ambulance District dispatching services from the Monett-Lawrence County 911 Center to Barry County E-911 Center, but a couple of snafus will keep the system from going live as planned on Oct. 1.
“We have three options,” said Valerie Wilson, director of operations. “First is keep what we have and go with an internet protocol that will signal from our base to a repeater in Butterfield. If the internet goes down, so would our communications.
TORONTO — A humorous 911 call has a Toronto-area police service reminding people only to call that number in emergency situations – and not when upset with sandwich toppings.
Peel Regional Police released audio of the call Saturday. It’s not clear when it was initially placed.
In the call, a man can be heard requesting police assistance because he claimed to have been “threatened by an owner … regarding my food.”
Six months of management consulting services at the York County 911 Center will cost taxpayers $297 per hour for 2,524 hours of work, according to the contract the York County Commissioners approved on Wednesday.
IXP Corp., a New Jersey-based company specializing in 911 communications, will have six employees working on the project under the $750,000 deal.
“Am I happy about the cost? Of course not,” said York County Commissioner Chris Reilly. “But can you put a price on public safety?”
