By Liam Verster

911 service

Grande Prairie’s emergency dispatch centre now serving Fort Nelson and area

Jan 28, 2021 | 1:26 PM

The Grande Prairie Fire Department’s dispatch centre has expanded it’s services to connect callers in British Columbia’s Northern Rockies Regional Municipality to their local emergency service providers.

The Municipality did not have 911 service prior to this partnership with the Grande Prairie Fire Department, and instead people needed to dial the required emergency service provider directly.

However, thanks to this new partnership, emergency 911 calls made in the municipality will be redirected to the Grande Prairie dispatch centre, where it will be processed and transferred to the proper emergency service provider.

Grande Prairie Fire Chief Preben Bossen says when they were approached with this idea, they looked into the logistics of how it would work. There were some challenges, including the fact that 911 calls couldn’t be transferred across provincial borders.

However, they did manage to find a way to work around that issue.

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“What happens is up on their end is they dial 911 and get through to our dispatch centre basically, through a couple 1-800 number phone lines we installed that comes into our dispatch centre, and in our dispatch centre those lines are, in essence, labeled as 911 from the region up there, and then we process the calls from here,” says Bossen.

Once the calls come through, the staff at the dispatch centre asks what services are required, and then transfers the caller to their local EMS, Fire or Police services.

Bossen adds that, while not a true 911 service, it does work in connecting people with the emergency services, and users shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Mayor for the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality, Gary Foster, says having this service has been a long time coming.

Foster says while making calls directly to the specific emergency services needed at the time may have worked for the residents, it wasn’t very good for tourists or people travelling along the Alaska Highway.

“Most years the tourism amounts to about 250,000 people, and if they get into an emergency, they have a health emergency or a car accident or something, they’re not aware that they don’t have 911 service. So this is going to make a big difference for the safety of the public,” says Foster.

Foster adds the partnership they formed with Grande Prairie Fire Department to run this service was also very affordable, with the cost of the system amounting to about $1.95 per resident.

Bossen says prior to this partnership, the Grande Prairie dispatch centre looked into the additional call volume that would need to be handled, but the historical data proved that it wasn’t going to be too much to handle.

Bossen says the staff won’t be hard-pressed by the additional calls either, as the Grande Prairie Fire Department already acts as a hub for emergency calls.

“We are the 911 call answering and dispatch for fire departments for the whole Northwest corner of Alberta, so we do have over 60 customers that we dispatch for,” says Bossen.

Foster adds that experience was another reason the municipality wanted to have Grande Prairie run this service.

The 911 system being operated in the municipality right now is very basic, just transferring calls to the necessary services, though by 2023, they will need to move to the next generation of enhanced services.

Bossen says the next generation of 911 services will include location tracking for calls and won’t have issues with calls coming from across the border. He says he hopes the municipality will continue their partnership when those changes are made in the future.