In the eyes of its designers, Chicago’s new 911 system is the nation’s most sophisticated emergency calling network and will help make the city a safer place when it comes on-line in the fall.
To detractors, it’s a $217 million boondoggle symbolized by the elegant, coffee-colored granite Chicago Emergency Communications Center, complete with an exercise room, lavender briefing room and sweeping atrium.
Either way, come Thursday, the city will begin testing a new communications network that officials hope will end perennial complaints that citizens needing fast response from 911 sometimes get long waits and busy signals.
City officials say that what taxpayers are getting is not just a new building, but more of an emergency services information highway protected by nearly enough security for the Pentagon.
“What was cloaked in controversy initially is going to be looked at as visionary,” vowed Bill Corbett, the city’s coordinator for the new system.
When the new system begins operating in the fall, the city will go from an antiquated system jammed into police headquarters and City Hall to a state-of-the-art computer center ensconced in a virtual fortress on the West Side.
But the building, tornadoproof and rooted to the ground with a caisson foundation that goes down 110 feet to bedrock, is just part of Chicago’s leap into high-tech dispatching.
The entire system is knitted together on an independent, 176-mile network of fiber-optic cables that run to 215 fire stations, police stations and city buildings. The network is actually two separate loops, going to nearly the same places by different routes, a built-in redundancy so one loop can cover the city if the other fails.
The city claims that the dedicated network is immune to computer hackers because it never connects to regular phone lines. For security reasons, they won’t even say what streets the new cables run under.
And in a pilot program, police officers in the 14th District will soon begin using hand-held computers to run license plate checks, look for warrants, and make other communications that now jam crowded radio frequencies.
In the near future, police reports will be filled out on the computers, eliminating costly paperwork and allowing for more thorough and rapid statistical analysis, officials said.
The new $36 million building at the heart of the system has a command center that can be converted into a “war room” during emergencies. The entire facility can be used as a secure barracks with cots and a kitchen to feed hundreds of people.
“When you have civil unrest, you don’t want your people to travel,” Corbett said.
All this costs money. When Mayor Richard Daley announced the project in 1989, the cost was put at $95 million. By the time a ground-breaking ceremony took place in 1992, the cost had ballooned to more than $150 million. When the mayor showed off the building to the media on Monday, the cost was hovering at about $217 million.
City officials said they built a much better and more advanced system than was envisioned when the $95 million figure was used.
The original $95 million cost was to have been paid by a monthly 95-cent surcharge now on each phone line in the city. The remainder has been financed by general obligation bonds, which are backed by property taxes.
“The old 911 system was created in the 1960s,” Daley said Monday. “Nobody has a television or a radio or a telephone that old. This is more than state of the art. This is about public safety.”
More Top Picks Building An Emergency Kit For Heart Patients
The new 911 center at 1411 W. Madison St. will completely change the way the city’s 5 million emergency calls are handled each year. If the system works as its designers expect it to, it will handle calls more quickly and reliably.
Currently, 60 percent of 911 calls are answered in 12 seconds. The city predicts that under the new system, 99 percent of the calls will be answered within 10 seconds.
The old system relied on cards being filled out and carried around the dispatch room. Dispatchers must memorize locations of firehouses and what kind of trucks are housed where. The new system is paperless and automated.
There are 108 consoles in the heart of the 160,000-square-foot center. Each console cost $75,000. Televisions the size of movie screens show weather maps and the city grid.
When a call comes into the new center, one computer screen in front of the dispatcher will flash the callers’ address and, in many cases, the language spoken in the household and any pertinent medical information, including whether there is a disabled person in the home. It will also display whether police have been called to the home before, something especially useful to officers responding to domestic fights.
Another screen in front of the dispatcher will instantly display a map, showing the location of the call and the exact footprint of the buildings in the area, which will help firefighters.
Firetrucks and ambulances are equipped with locating devices that are represented on the map, as well.
When the dispatcher discerns what the call is about, he or she enters it into the system, and an appropriate icon-a gun for an armed robbery, for example-flashes on the map at that address.
So when dispatchers look at their screens, it’s as if they are getting a video-game overview of the city.
If the caller hangs up, the dispatcher can hit a button that instantly replays a tape of the call to pick up missed details.
The maps, loaded into the system by 15 Whitney Young High School students hired by a contractor, show every free-standing structure in the city, down to every last garage.
The multimedia capabilities of the system will allow a dispatcher to punch up photos of some buildings, even film clips. Buildings containing hazardous materials will have their floor plans loaded into the computers so dispatchers can lead firefighters toward, or away from, dangerous places.
On Thursday, the city will begin testing the system by having workers in different places call into the system with a secret three-digit number. (Already, the system is getting calls from people who accidentally dial the number.)
At some point, they will hook up automatic machines that will test the capacity of the system.
“I’m going to make 108 calls simultaneously just to see if I can get a busy,” Corbett said.
Cellular calls remain a problem. The system still will not be able to identify the location of a caller who is on a cellular phone. Corbett said the cellular industry has to establish the standards to allow 911 equipment to identify where a caller is.
Corbett believes in making workers comfortable.
The keyboards can be raised and lowered, even high enough that dispatchers can stand and take calls if they wish. Air is pumped through the building 18 times a day to “keep staff alert and fresh.”
“This isn’t for comfort, it’s for efficiency,” Corbett said.
There are two small rooms where 911 dispatchers can retire after an especially stressful call, and there is also a facility called the Stress Mitigation Room, which is actually a small room with exercise machines.
“Healthy bodies make healthy minds,” Corbett said.