Ten years later, 9-1-1 is a part of life.

Jeff Green | Dec 10, 2014

It was ten years ago this week that 911 service was introduced in North and Central Frontenac and upgraded in Kingston and South Frontenac, tying civic address numbers to land line phone numbers in all of Frontenac County for seamless dispatch of fire, ambulance and police service throughout the county.

The ceremony marking the launch of the service took place on December 8, 2004 at the North Frontenac Telephone Company office, which had become the central meeting point for the 16 key volunteers, municipal and EMS personnel who had been working on the 911 project, some of them for seven years.

The project was in the early planning stages in the fall of 1997, months before the founding of North and Central Frontenac, and one of the first key pieces of information that was identified was the need for up to date mapping for the new townships.

Marcel Giroux, who came on as chair of the 911 committee at that time, recalls that the only comprehensive mapping that was available then were the Ontario Base Maps. The problem was that those maps had not been updated for Frontenac County for decades.

“The maps were dated from the early 1960s, and were pretty much useless for our purposes,” he said, when interviewed this week. “We pretty much had to start from scratch."

The process suffered a few delays along the way, the first of which was the ice storm that greeted the newly amalgamated townships at the very start of 1998. The politicians and emergency services personnel, who put in countless hours dealing with the ice storm and its aftermath, would undoubtedly have benefited from all the mapping and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) that are available today, which are in many ways an off-shoot of the 911 process. As it was, it was local knowledge and chain saw-wielding road crews and volunteers who were relied upon to keep everyone safe and warm.

Giroux approached the townships in the late spring of 1998 to get them on board for the 911 system.

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) Colonial and Annette St. Pierre (Palmerston/Canonto), Marsden Kirk and Jack Nicolson (Kennebec), Faye Putnam and Elva Price (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.

“One of the big jobs for the committee members was to sort out all the roads in their own districts and match them with the maps. There were roads with no names, names with no roads, roads with more than one name, and names that appeared on a number of roads,” said Giroux.

CGIS of Perth was contracted to develop brand new maps for the 911 project, beginning the process that has resulted, 15 years later, in comprehensive paper and electronic mapping covering all corners of Frontenac County. Exact locations of properties and buildings are now just a click away on a computer or smart phone.

The 911 process continued for three years, and by the end of 2001, all properties had been identified and civic addressing was in place. It was time to wait for Bell Canada to do some internal work to prepare for the 911 switch over.

In the meantime, the townships jointly hired Chris Matheson as 911 co-ordinator, in order to bring the project to its fruition and to provide the kind of support that the project would continue to require even after its launch. New properties would need to be added to the data base and the system would need to be upgraded over time. Matheson was later hired on as the full time IT (Information Technology) person for Central Frontenac and a similar position was created in North Frontenac, in recognition of the role that electronic information and GIS plays in the current workings of municipalities.

Matheson, who now works for the City of Kingston as a systems analyst, recalls the 911 project fondly.

“It was a good project to work on, particularly because of all the work that the volunteers did right up until the very end, matching phone numbers with addresses. We needed 98% of them assured for Bell to go ahead with it, and they made it happen,” he said.

Marcel Giroux is still a little upset over a decision that Bell Canada made to delay the launch of 911 in Central and North Frontenac until South Frontenac and Kingston were ready for 911 enhanced. A process that was supposed to take a few months ended up taking twice as long.

“I don't know if it cost anyone their lives or anything waiting the extra 18 months, but it did bother me at the time,” he said.

When the system was brought on stream, the volunteers and emergency personnel were all smiles, celebrating the new millennium in Frontenac County.

As 911 moves forward, hooking up GPS systems in cell phones with on-board computers in ambulances, police cars, even fire trucks, will make the service stronger yet as cell service penetrates the far reaches of the County.

It's all a far cry from 1997, when there were not even reasonable paper maps of Frontenac County.