So says Paul Davis, MHA for Topsail and legislative assistant to the minister of Municipal Affairs, adding that a committee of senior officials was struck early in 2009 and charged with the task of preparing a request for proposals for a feasibility study into a provincewide enhanced 911 system.
The terms of reference are being worked on and he expects the call for proposals done soon.
“It’s a lot of work in itself to develop the request for proposals, the parameters and specifics of what that proposal will include,” Davis said. “A lot of that work has been done. They’re in the process of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”
He said in rural Newfoundland there’s a belief that a local emergency response is better than a central 911 response.
Often people will call the ambulance services who they know personally.
In the mid-1990s a projection of the cost of an enhanced 911 system pegged the price tag in the area of $10 million.
In spite of criticism from opposition politicians, he said an incident in Corner Brook Tuesday afternoon in which the 911 centre at the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary headquarters was without land-line service for about 40 minutes may not have been alleviated by an enhanced 911 system with an automatic backup.
Davis said the Constabulary instituted a backup plan shortly after the service went down, in the form of cellphone numbers distributed to media outlets for broadcast.
The outage resulted from maintenance on the phone system about 2:15 p.m.
By 2:40 the phone numbers were in emailed press releases. By 2:55 p.m. the problem was fixed.
“When it comes to technology, you can attempt to have all the redundancies and protections built in that you’d like and now and then you’re going to have failures that are going to take some time to sort out,” Davis said. “That’s the nature of technology.”
