Wireless 911 address system near completion

By Jim Tiffin
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — The state, a private company and Cibola County are working together to finish wireless 911 addressing before the new consolidated dispatch center is up and running in April, said Darryl McCullough, the county's rural addressing coordinator.

"In order for the 911 system to be able to locate someone using a cell phone, we are going to have the give an address to each cellular phone tower," McCullough said. Addressing is going on statewide as well as in Cibola County.

Each cell tower has three sides and by addressing each side of every tower, when a cell phone user calls 911, the dispatch center will be able to triangulate the call and determine where the caller is located, he said.

The work being done on the towers is by Spatial Data Research, a company contracted to do the work through the state's Department of Finance Administration, McCullough said.

"Without an address on the towers' faces, we are not sure what county the call is coming from, and placing the location of the caller can be difficult," he said.

"People don't look at signs when they're traveling and many times out-of-state callers may not know where they are," he said.

The information on all the cell towers will be provided to a centralized hub at the state level. Once there and placed into the system, it will be downloaded to all the dispatch centers in the state for their data, McCullough said.

The county's rural addressing department is currently in the maintenance stage with addressing in Cibola County, McCullough said.

"You are never 100 percent in rural addressing.

"People move and move homes, trailers move and new subdivisions like High Country and Indian Knolls come into the rural part of the county," he said. The department does not address vacant property.

The target date for operations for the consolidated dispatch center, which will serve the county and the city of Grants only at this point, is April 22, said Sheila Grant, the recently named dispatch center supervisor.

About $1.3 million in new equipment is coming in to bring the system up to speed, she said.

There will be more than one dispatcher on duty 24 hours a day, every day of the year, Grant said.

The village of Milan has opted not to join the consolidated center and run its own department.

The consolidated dispatch will be located at the old Cibola County Sheriff's Department in the county complex at 515 W. High St.

— To contact reporter Jim Tiffin, call (505) 287-2197 or e-mail: tiffin.independent@yahoo.com.