After more than two years Carteret County’s new e911 telecommunications center will become fully operational. This project has been in the works for quite some time. It’s required a substantial amount of funding and a lot of hard work from county staff. According to the News Times report the center would be fully operational by the end of yesterday.
The new center is located next to Cape Lookout High School on Bridges St. in Morehead City. At a projected cost of $3.5 million the e911 center came under fire from critics and even some commissioners. That’s not a really big price tag considering all the upgrades to radio, telephone, and computer systems included in the estimate.
At any rate the project was completed well under the initial estimate. The final total was something like $2.89 million. I just hope we didn’t skimp on somethings that will only need major upgrading next year.
In years past there were dispatchers at four different “public safety answering points”. Morehead City, Beaufort (Sheriff’s Department), Atlantic Beach, and Emerald Isle each had a dispatcher. Now they’ll all be centrally located in Morehead City. Which to me seems like it has both pros and cons. If all the dispatchers and emergency communications are in ONE facility, that would create a single point of failure. But we’re limited in financial resources so I guess we can only take redundancy so far.
It is refreshing, though, to see the county doing something in advance of it being needed. We all know Carteret County is growing by leaps and bounds. This trend shows no sign of slowing down, and our emergency communications were in serious need of updating to keep up with the growth occurring in our area.