Only weeks after the Glen Ellyn (Ill.) Volunteer Fire Department joined DU-COMM, or DuPage Public Safety Communications, in 1976, a train carrying ammonia derailed in downtown Glen Ellyn, igniting a fire and a serious hazmat situation. DU-COMM dispatchers coordinated the flow of mutual aid from multiple agencies to the scene, while a separate group of operators answered thousands of phone calls from concerned residents. Glen Ellyn's chief at the time stated that DU-COMM paid for itself on that day alone.

A single dispatcher could not simultaneously manage the fireground and the inundation of phone calls. But DU-COMM can, and does, on a regular basis. In fact, Rich Bauer is certain DU-COMM ranks high among centralized dispatch agencies. “I have no doubt that we are the best trained and equipped, and that we have the best people in the business right here,” says Bauer, the deputy director of DU-COMM, a multi-jurisdictional agency that provides dispatching and emergency communications to 27 police and fire agencies in DuPage County, just west of Chicago. His glowing evaluation comes after 28 years of steady refinement and growth for DU-COMM, which now covers a population of more than 650,000.

A closer look at DU-COMM demonstrates how shared dispatching can save money for a department while expanding its capabilities, improving its performance and shifting the day-to-day burden of maintaining an operations center.

How it works

Roughly 250,000 911 calls per year, or 700 per day, go to DU-COMM's 12,700-square-foot facility in Glendale Heights, Ill. Its 300-foot communications tower, holding an array of transmitters and receivers, is the only feature that sets the facility apart from its neighbors in a commercial park. The centerpiece of the building is a 2,600-square-foot operations center that contains 12 police and four fire console positions. The building plan allows for expansion to 100 consoles if necessary.

DU-COMM employs about 50 full-time telecommunicators, better known as operators or dispatchers, along with six part-time telecommunicators who serve when needed. About 10 telecommunicators are on shift at a given time, with three assigned to fire dispatching and six or seven assigned to police dispatching.

The telecommunicators are led by six operations managers and supported by a technical services department. The in-house technicians execute almost all of DU-COMM's maintenance tasks including servicing the phone system, but they don't handle major software upgrades and tower maintenance. With regards to technology, DU-COMM claims to be ahead of the pack.

“I'm a firm believer in using technology to increase efficiency of operations, reduce your costs, and provide better information,” says George Longmeyer, executive director of DU-COMM for the past five years.

Hand-written paper cards gave way to DU-COMM's first computer-aided dispatch system in 1983, which Computer Support Technician Shaun Lang describes as “home-grown,” because the newness of the technology demanded that the users be resourceful and creative with what they had.

“It allowed us to send information to responding units, but was vastly limited in its functionality. The call-takers weren't able to enter multiple calls in the system at the same time and viewing officer activity or locations of units wasn't the greatest.”

With the move in 1995 to its current facility, DU-COMM spent $1.65 million on a new computer system featuring the Motorola Printrak Premier CAD system, and has consistently upgraded the system since then. Unlike the previous CAD, the Printrak system is designed for multi-jurisdictional agencies like DU-COMM.

“We do daily downloads to our agencies, so whatever we put into CAD [during a call] gets downloaded into their local record management systems on a daily basis,” explains Lang.

The current CAD system can interface with a growing number of services and technologies. When a 911 call comes in, the CAD system connects with mapping software to determine the caller's exact location. Currently the system's in place for landline phones only, but soon it will be able to locate cell phone users as well. Operators also can access the call history of a particular location to assist responders as they decide how to approach certain incidents.

DU-COMM has supported mobile data terminals in police operations for several years and is now seeing more of its member fire agencies become equipped with MDTS. The CAD system connects with MDTS in responding vehicles, relays the location of the call, and triggers the MDT to display relevant information. A few departments have MDTS with advanced mapping programs, which provides detailed diagrams on the location of hydrants, sewer lines, electrical lines and building schematics. The layers of mapping data are stored locally on the MDTS, eliminating the need for time-consuming downloads en route to a call. Because MDTS can directly exchange information with DU-COMM's CAD system, dispatchers have less work to do on the radio, freeing up both the dispatchers and the radios for other purposes.

In the near future, DU-COMM plans to add the capacity to support streaming video, intended for vehicles to share real-time images with each other, and to provide automatic vehicle locator service to interested departments.

User input and self-critique

Agreement on common procedures is essential at DU-COMM. Without it, shared dispatching would be untamable and cumbersome. “There are trade-offs,” says Longmeyer. “You have to go along with the majority. You realize that when you go to something like centralized dispatch, you generally agree upon common procedures where possible. There are some egos you have to check when you come in here.”

Nevertheless, DU-COMM still is open to suggestions from its users. That input can come through one of DU-COMM's four oversight committees, each of which meets monthly. Police and fire each have an operations subcommittee to focus on procedural details and adjustments. Recently, the fire operations subcommittee evaluated the codes used in fire dispatching and reduced the total number from 600 to about 400. Certain idiosyncratic codes, specific to just one of DU-COMM's member agencies, were cut in just one example of how shared dispatching requires concessions from individual agencies for the sake of standardization. The chiefs' committee, consisting of both police and fire chiefs, can suggest topics for the subcommittees to review in addition to addressing budgeting and more general issues.

Recently, DU-COMM initiated a peer review committee, composed of members from other committees, to review major incidents. Members listen to recordings of an incident's dispatch traffic, critique the dispatcher's performance, and if necessary make recommendations to the subcommittees if the incident highlights a procedural flaw.

At the top of the committee structure, the executive committee consists of mayors, city managers and presidents from DU-COMM's member communities, and it gives final approval to policy changes and other significant modifications.

One recent change that made its way through the committee system altered DU-COMM's EMS dispatching procedure for a full arrest and came from input given by the Lombard (Ill.) Fire Department. To trim response time, DU-COMM now follows a flash dispatch policy for full arrests, giving EMS personnel only a quick alert tone before dispatching the call. Police dispatchers use the same procedure for robberies in progress. Previously, the dispatcher would send a series of tones before speaking, giving away precious seconds.

DU-COMM also collects feedback from another set of users: 911 callers. Randomly selected callers receive survey postcards in the mail, asking them to rank the performance of the dispatcher and responding agency. DU-COMM shares this information with those agencies. Of those surveyed, 99% give DU-COMM a favorable rating, according to Longmeyer.

Staffing challenges

“To remain a good dispatch center, you train, you train, you train, you train,” says Longmeyer. Persistent training not only keeps dispatchers from getting lazy, but also enables them to perform at the high level that the job demands. “Our operators do multi-tasking. We don't have call-takers per se. They do call taking and dispatching all at once. So the training is more complex,” he says.

Prospective employees must pass a typing test (35 words per minute, with 95% accuracy), a psychological screening and a background check. If successful, a new hire begins with two weeks of classroom training, which introduces DU-COMM's computer system and basic procedures. Then, under the guidance of a training operator, the trainee spends six to eight weeks learning how to answer 911 calls. After receiving a preliminary certification as a telephone complaint-taker, he or she practices and hones that skill for up to three months, during which time the training supervisors assign the trainee to either police or fire dispatching.

After that comes six to eight weeks of radio dispatch training with a different training supervisor. Trainees also have to pass written exams at various stages of their training. The whole process takes an average of nine months, but “it takes a year to a year and a half before they've handled everything they are going to handle, and developed that confidence,” says Longmeyer.

Managers continue to monitor and critique dispatchers through an in-house quality-assurance program. A bank of servers keeps digital recordings of DU-COMM's call and dispatch activity, so managers can randomly review an operator's performance. When managers notice certain errors becoming more common among multiple operators, they often schedule classroom sessions to address the problem.

Training is not the only recurring staffing issue. Retention remains a constant problem. Before moving to its current location in 1995, DU-COMM occupied a much smaller space in a bomb shelter beneath the DuPage County Highway Department complex in Wheaton, Ill. The cramped subterranean environment contributed to a high rate of staff turnover, a problem that continues to confront DU-COMM officials, even with its new and improved facility.

Much of the turnover problem stems from the fact that so many new hires at DU-COMM are on waiting lists for local police and fire departments. They see DU-COMM as a way to stay close to their preferred career while waiting for a position in uniformed service to open. When it does, DU-COMM has another vacancy to fill.

Firefighters and police officers also are frustrated at the steady stream of new voices coming from DU-COMM, and the relative shortage of those voices during storms and other busy periods. Not enough dispatchers to handle a large number of calls means that departments sometimes get lost in the shuffle and must wait their turn as DU-COMM works on other situations.

“It's got to continue to get better, and the only way we are going to do that is to increase the number of dispatchers, and make the job more attractive,” says Jerry Tonne, deputy chief of the Lombard (Ill.) Fire Department, which has dealt with DU-COMM since its inception in 1975. The current salary for a DU-COMM operator starts at $33,000 and increases in steps to around $50,000. By means of comparison, a veteran air traffic controller can make more than $100,000.

Tonne also cautions that dispatchers must be “the cream of the crop” to satisfy the high demands placed on them. Firefighters and DU-COMM's managers agree that dispatching is hard work and isn't for everyone. Given the nature of the job, Longmeyer believes that a steady amount of staff turnover is understandable. Still, amassing a corps of career dispatchers remains an elusive goal for DU-COMM.

DU-COMM's value, monetary and otherwise

All this technology and expertise cost more than any department could shoulder alone. But by pooling their resources, departments pay less to get more.

The $5 million operating budget of DU-COMM comes from assessments on the member agencies. The 12 police departments in DU-COMM together must contribute 76% of the operating budget, or $3.8 million, while the 15 fire departments or fire prevention districts must jointly account for the other 24%, or $1.2 million. Those percentages reflect the proportion of police-to-fire emergencies that DU-COMM handles. Police departments divide their bill according to the number of sworn officers in each department. Fire departments pay according to their share, in terms of percentage, of the total accessed valuation of DU-COMM's entire territory.

“We're a line item on 27 budgets,” explains Bauer.

With DU-COMM's size and experience come operating efficiencies that outperform a single-agency dispatch center. “Maybe some department now has six dispatchers,” Longmeyer hypothesizes. “They can join DU-COMM, and we might only have to put on three new dispatchers. I might not have to put on any, just because their call volume is low.”

After joining DU-COMM, administrators no longer have to worry about a host of issues. Gone are all the personnel headaches connected with staffing an operations center around the clock and keeping the staff well-trained. Gone are the constant repair costs and system upgrades; departments are left to do what they do best.

Most, if not all, fire agencies in DU-COMM can provide examples of how DU-COMM is indispensable during major incidents. During an extra-alarm fire at an apartment complex fire in Lombard in 1996, a woman called 911 because she thought she had to jump from her balcony to escape the fire. A DU-COMM operator kept her on the line until firefighters arrived and evacuated her safely. They evacuated more than 40 other people, four from balconies, and no one was injured.

“Prior to DU-COMM, we would have run that call with minimal support from a dispatch center,” says Tonne. “We would have lost track of those people. We would have definitely had some casualties there.”

Bauer agrees that DU-COMM's value goes beyond dollars, as evidenced by levels of performance, efficiency and standardization in communication that departments could not accomplish alone. “We've always broken trail. We have always led the pack,” he says. “Our departments expect that of us.”

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Tim Bodony is a freelance journalist based in Glen Ellyn, Ill., one of the communities served by DU-COMM. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame, and recently served as news reporter and producer for KNOM radio in Alaska.

Illinois' MABAS system sets regional standard

DU-COMM is the Division 12 headquarters of the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System, which began in 1968. First proposed by Capt. Don Kuhn of the Elk Grove Village (Ill.) Fire Department, MABAS began in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, but is now poised to extend throughout the Midwest. There are 48 divisions throughout Illinois and four divisions in Wisconsin. More divisions in these and other states are likely on the way, along with a mutual aid system for police based on MABAS. These trends underscore MABAS' role as a model of interoperability and integration in the post — Sept. 11 era.

“MABAS has a very important role in the fire service in Illinois,” according to Jerry Tonne, vice president of MABAS and deputy chief of the Lombard (Ill.) Fire Department. “[MABAS] is unique in the fact that we are responding under one contract, with one set of rules that is for everyone.” In Illinois alone, that means firefighters from 900 departments operate under the MABAS contract.

The system is activated about 700 times per year, orchestrating a flow of equipment and personnel to extra-alarm fires, mass-casualty incidents, hazmat situations and anything else that demands outside resources for a stricken community. Besides traditional emergency equipment, MABAS is now incorporating a growing number of specially trained personnel, including HAZMAT teams, technical rescue teams and underwater rescue teams.

To be involved in the system, equipment and procedures must meet the definitions set by MABAS. As Tonne explains, “You can't call for a tanker and get something with 750 gallons on it. The tanker has to have 1,000 gallons or more to be considered a tanker.”

Because it already provides a proven infrastructure for coping with major incidents, MABAS is prominently figuring into homeland security plans. The system was put to the test in TOPOFF 2, the $16 million terrorism response exercise conducted by the Office of Homeland Security that took place on May 15. Fire departments from 11 counties were involved, all dispatched by the Regional Emergency Dispatch Center in Northbrook, Ill., the statewide emergency operations center. An hour into the drill, RED Center went off the air in a simulated bomb attack, requiring all dispatching to move to another location as reports of building collapses and hazmat incidents poured in. Dispatchers had to communicate with hundreds of responders with whom they had never worked before across a large area. “That's why dispatchers have to be top-of-the-line,” says Tonne.

In its Terrorism Preparedness Report, the State of Illinois calls for the expansion of MABAS and the creation of a law enforcement mutual aid agreement modeled after MABAS. But if MABAS continues to grow, Tonne predicts that it will have to regionalize.