DEPARTMENT: Police
DEPARTMENT HEAD: William P. McManus, Chief of Police
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED:
SUBJECT: 911 Call Service Loss Mitigation
SUMMARY:
The proposed Inter Local Agreement (ILA) establishes an arrangement between the Cities of San Antonio and Austin, in which each city will answer the other's 911 calls during an outage at their respective Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs). This will greatly improve each entity's disaster recovery plan for answering 911 calls during an emergency. In addition, the technology is in place to transfer calls with little notice, allowing each city to keep pace with an emergency outage and provide better service to the citizens in each city.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The City of San Antonio's PSAP is located at 8039 Challenger Dr., San Antonio, TX 78235, in the southern end of town, and it's where all of the City's 1.4 emergency and 850,000 non-emergency phone calls are answered each year. Should the PSAP lose their ability to operate, a back-up location is available with the Bexar Metro 911 Regional Emergency Operations Center (REOC), located at 911 Saddletree Ct., Shavano Park, Texas 78231, approximately 22 miles away from the PSAP (about 45 minutes away in typical traffic). Bexar Metro 911 is constructing a new REOC, located at 4700 Quarry Run, San Antonio 78249, which will have greater capacity to host PSAP staff on an ad hoc and potentially, an ongoing basis. The City is working with Bexar Metro 911fo finalize operational plans to utilize this new facility as a back-up.
Over the past four years, the PSAP has experienced three 911 outages - one due to a gas leak, another involving a technical problem with the telephone system, and the last outage was due to a software problem that caused intermittent service issues. The outages lasted between three to four hours. During each of these incidents, 911 phone calls went unanswered while the PSAP determined whether to relocate (as in the case...
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