Piscataquis County requests 911 equipment

DOVER-FOXCROFT – The Emergency Services Communications Bureau will get a hard nudge this week about fulfilling a promise reportedly made to the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department several years ago.

County officials say they jumped through hoops years ago to convert to the state’s Enhanced-911 system, only to have the state drag its feet on providing the county the equipment and software to handle cell phone calls generated in the county.

While 911 calls made from land-line telephones in Piscataquis County are routed directly to the sheriff’s office, calls made from cell phones in the county are routed through the Maine State Police in Orono. That department then either relays the cellular caller’s message or transfers the call to the sheriff’s department.

Upset that the routing of calls could delay an emergency response, the Piscataquis County commissioners signed a letter this week asking the bureau to expedite the delivery and installation of the equipment.

“The Piscataquis County commissioners, along with many town officials and social service organizations within the county, believe the citizens of Piscataquis County are not currently receiving the best emergency communications services possible,” the commissioners wrote.

According to Piscataquis County Manager Mike Henderson, on two occasions there has been “incorrect or garbled information passed on to us.” Neither call resulted in serious injury or loss of property, but it could have, he said.

In one of those calls, the information relayed from the Maine State Police in Orono prompted the sheriff’s department to dispatch the Brownville Fire Department to a fire in Lakeview, Henderson said. When firefighters arrived, they found no fire and called back to the sheriff’s department. The sheriff’s department then contacted Maine State Police in Orono to question the address and discovered the fire was on the Milo side of the lake. The sheriff’s department then activated the Milo Fire Department.

Lakeview faced two bills, one from each fire department, a result that didn’t set well with town officials, he said. Lakeview officials first suggested the county pay part of the bill since it was a dispatch error but in the end Lakeview paid both bills, Henderson said.

Fred Bever, Public Utilities Commission spokesman, said Thursday his department recognizes there is a desire by some of the public safety answering points to take cell or wireless 911 calls.

The emergency bureau has made a priority list for responding to those requests, and that list was outlined in a memo sent to all answering points on March 31, Bever said. He said the bureau is starting with those answering points that have the highest call volumes, so work at the Gray answering points is under way. Bever said the communications bureau has to work with cell providers in rerouting emergency response calls that previously went to state police to the local answering points.

A “fairly in-depth analysis” has to be done to determine which of the hits on a cell tower are actually calls seeking help from state police and how many are for local emergency responders, Bever said. “It’s fairly resource-intensive,” he said.

Bever said that when Gray is completed, next on the list is the Central Maine Regional Call Center in Augusta and then the Department of Public Safety answering point in Orono, which receives cellular calls from Piscataquis County.

“Requests like the one Piscataquis County has made – we’re aware of them and we’re working to them as we can and as we outlined in the March 31 memo,” Bever said. “All of these calls are being safely routed to an answering point and being dispatched and unfortunately it’s not a speedy process because resources are limited.”

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