The nerve center for those charged with ensuring safety at the Democratic National Convention will be the city’s new 911 center, a few blocks east of the United Center.
Inside the bronze-colored, polished-granite building at 1411 W. Madison St., the Secret Service will oversee a phalanx of security agencies, including the Chicago Police Department, the FBI, Illinois State Police and the Chicago Fire Department.
The 6-month-old, $216 million building, officially called the Emergency Communications Center, is one of the strongest in the city, built to withstand winds of 120 m.p.h. Its base stands on 80 caissons, each dug 120 feet into bedrock.
On Aug. 29, the last night of the convention, Vice President Al Gore, nearly all of the Cabinet, dozens of members of Congress, governors and other officials will gather to hear President Clinton accept his party’s nomination.
For all practical purposes, the seat of government will be Chicago, not Washington. And with that transfer comes specialized equipment to encrypt communications and do other top-secret stuff.
One large situation room, most recently used during the celebration after the Bulls’ championship, has been placed off-limits to most of the 500 city employees who work at the 911 center.
Equipment in that room, including large electronic maps, will let police and others monitor locations of demonstrations, traffic flow, and the status of police and other security workers scattered throughout the city.
“We can do things that we have never done before–hand out assignments, look at graphic representations of areas where people will be deployed,” said William Corbett, a retired police commander who is executive director of the communications center.
Chicago police will deploy 25 special “first response” teams, each consisting of nine officers and a sergeant, throughout the city in small buses. The status and location of those units will be available in the situation room.
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In addition to coordinating security at the convention, workers at the Emergency Communications Center will continue their normal activities answering 911 calls. It’s no small task, considering that about 4 million calls come into the center each year.