Prior to September 2003, Houston had three emergency communications centers for 9-1-1: Neutral Public Safety Answering Point, Police Department Emergency Communications Division, and Fire Department Emergency Communications Operations. Each agency had separate answering centers, computer networks, and technical support. The development of the state-of-the-art Houston Emergency Center (HEC) consolidates all of these efforts.
HEC is a $50 million investment towards a secured facility equipped with state of the art emergency communications technology. These advancements are utilized by the center's 9-1-1 call takers and emergency dispatchers from the Houston Police and Fire Departments. System upgrades include police dispatch, fire dispatch, fire records, fire alerting, and geographic information at a cost of approximately $12 million. Antiquated facilities have been replaced with an innovative and redundant complex that consolidates emergency communications.
The upgrades have improved delivery of Public Safety services to citizens who live, work, and visit Houston by providing a facility in which calls for emergency services within Houston can be received and dispatched to emergency first responders. Other capabilities that allow HEC to have reliable communication is its link to two-way radio communication systems that support the City of Houston Police, Fire/EMS, and Emergency Management agencies so that dispatchers can communicate with personnel in the field.
Beyond its daily operations, the facility's Emergency Operations Center, during times of incident activation, allows interface and constant communications with local, state, and federal agencies. The center's most significant benefit is the common protocol for interagency transaction exchange between 9-1-1, Police, Fire, EMS, and Emergency Management.
Approximately 9,000 emergency calls per day are processed at HEC. The volume of emergency calls can easily double during times of inclement weather or special City social/sporting events (e.g. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (September/October 2005), National Basketball Association All Star Game (February 2006), Major League Baseball 2005 World Series (October 2005), Super Bowl XXXVIII (January 2004), Major League Baseball All-Star Game (July 2004)).
The Houston Emergency Center is one of the most impressive and technology advanced emergency communications facility in the country.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
As a result of City concerns about the reliability of its Computer Aided Dispatch system, a comprehensive End-to-End Houston Emergency System Performance and Process Assessment was completed in March 2005 by MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit company that identified single points of failure and recommended mitigation actions which supported the center's quest to achieve system stabilization. Pursuant of information that relates to critical infrastructure (Sec. 418.181 of the Government Code) and information that relates to security issues for computers (Sec. 552.139 of the Government Code), selected information has been withheld from public disclosure.
In June, 2005, The Jefferson Wells Report, performance audit was published to enable management to maintain and seek improvements to streamline the center's operations.
Houston Emergency Center Follow-Up Review was published by Jefferson Wells in March of 2007.
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