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Feature Article December 9, 2004

Feature article December 9, 2004

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After 7 years of work, 911 finally arrives in Central and North FrontenacService also initiated in Bedford district, enhanced in the rest of South Frontenac

by Jeff Green

As of 2 pm on Wednesday, everywhere in Frontenac County and the City of Kingston, dialling 911 from a land line will quickly access fire, police or ambulance service, and provide those agencies with accurate information as to where the emergency call is coming from.

Enhanced 911 service is here.

For the 16 people who took on the job of finding all the roads and all the properties in North and Central Frontenac in the winter of 1998, it has been a long time coming. The process actually began a few months before Central and North Frontenac came into existence.

For Marcel Giroux, it began at a gas station, when Dave Gemmill of the Parham Ambulance Service approached him about the need for 911 in the north end of the county. He was so enthusiastic about it that I decided to go to the first meeting, which was held in August of 1997. By the second meeting, held in the fall, Marcel Giroux had become chair of the 911 committee, and I bought a book written by a Professor from Queens outlining what had to be done. I called other jurisdictions who had gone through the process to find out how to go about it.

When the new townships of North and Central Frontenac were formed in 1998, they quickly passed bylaws establishing the 911 committee as a committee of Council, and two people were sought from each of the seven former townships that made up the two new townships to do the hard work of identifying each of the over 8,000 properties on over 200 public roads and 400 private lanes within the two townships.

The people who took this on were: Dick Hook and Bill Rowsome (Barrie), Dave and Nancy Smith (Clar/Mill) Colonel and Annette St. Pierre (Palmerston/Canonto), Marsden Kirk and Jack Nicolson (Kennebec), Faye Putnam and Dave Willis (Olden), Gord Whan and Luc Salvador (Oso), and Lloyd Lee and Dave Hansen (Hinchinbrooke). Gleva Lemke took on the role of Secretary of the 911 committee, with Marcel Giroux being the 16th member.

Each of these pairs of people had the job of identifying the roads, measuring the roads, and at first they were doing the global positioning of the roads (GPS), until we found that the equipment we had for GPS work was inadequate.

Eventually two consultants from Kingston, both ex-Bell Canada employees were hired and they recommended hiring the Centre for Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) of Perth to complete the GPS work and prepare digital mapping. Once the roads and properties were all identified and civic addresses were assigned and posted, a formal application was made to Bell Canada to establish a 911 service. In May of 2002, Central and North Frontenac hired Chris Matheson as 911 coordinator and Internet Technology (IT) specialist.

I had a list of steps that had to be completed - many many steps, which I handed over to Chris, said Marcel Giroux.

One of the things that Chris Matheson initiated was the changing of road names that were too similar in order to save any potential confusion for emergency personnel, especially those coming from other jurisdictions. This led to some controversy, but Council took it on and it does make for a better 911 system, Matheson said in an interview this week.

In the past year and a half, the original group of volunteers has been called upon again, this time to match civic address numbers with phone numbers. Bell Canada requires that 98.2% of all civic addresses be paired with the corresponding phone numbers where there are phones. This process was only completed about 2 months ago, and now, finally the service is up and running.

Using 911 enhanced .

A 911 system has been in place for years in Portland, Loughborough and Storrington districts of South Frontenac and in the City of Kingston, but it was a rudimentary system compared to what has come on line this week. Under the old system, the dispatcher who received 911 calls would not know where the person was calling from. They would have the phone number, similar to a call display system, but the caller would have to provide information about their location, which took up time. Also, callers might be confused or injured, or calling from an unfamiliar place and would not be able to tell the dispatcher where they were calling from.

Under the 911 enhanced system, the dispatcher, located at a central dispatching centre in Orillia, will know the phone number and the civic address the call is coming from. Once they know whether it is ambulance, police, or fire services that are required, they can instantly route the information to the required service.

It is still important to know the civic addressing when making a 911 call for verification, but the new system should be quicker and less susceptible to human error.

A pamphlet about the new system will be mailed out this week to all residents in Central & North Frontenac. It stresses that callers know the civic address they are calling from, the name of the roadway, and the name of the municipality.

Knowing this information is important, particularly if calling from a four-party line, which is now rare, or calling from a cellular phone, which is common and becoming more so all the time, particularly in cases of traffic accidents. It is also possible, the pamphlet points out, that the information recorded in the 911 system is not correct. Calls are sometimes made from locations other than where the emergency is occurring, and in those cases callers need to know where the emergency is occurring.

The pamphlet also stresses never to call 911 as a joke or to see if it works. If 911 is dialled accidentally, it is imperative not to hang up, because emergency personnel will respond. Callers must stay on the line to tell the operator there is no emergency. If the caller hangs up, the operator will call back, and if the operator gets no response, police will be dispatched to the address to check the situation.

With the participation of the Government of Canada