Nine counties in northwestern and northcentral Pennsylvania have banded their emergency communications systems together in order to save money and ensure the system stays in working order despite any outages.

The 911 systems in Cameron, Clarion, Clearfield, Crawford, Elk, Forest, Jefferson, McKean and Warren counties will be joined through the Northern Tier Regional Telecommunications Project, an integrated network for handling emergency communications, officially known as the NG 911 Regional Telecommunications System and ESInet.

MCM Consulting of McMurray “is under contract to implement a nine county … telephony system for counties located in the northwestern and northwest central areas of Pennsylvania. The system includes fifty-five 911 positions and an IP fiber network with full diversity,” according to the company’s website.

Cameron and Elk counties were the first to go online as of May 1; the cutover for Clearfield and Jefferson counties came on May 15-16, and three other counties were connected before June 12. The entire system was implemented as of June 26.

The move was necessary to save money and to upgrade aging systems. Eight of the nine counties received “end of life” notifications from manufacturers, indicating they needed to completely replace existing systems. The remaining county, McKean, could continue using current equipment but would require costly upgrades.

Previously, county systems that operated on the same network could not communicate with each other due to a lack of integration.

By integrating these systems, counties would be able to transfer calls between facilities, reroute calls in case of overflow or system failure, and pass information between call centers.

Two switches will be installed, one maintained by Windstream in Elk County, and a second in Clearfield County which will be serviced by Verizon.

“Calls will go through Zito Media Fiber. If we lose fiber in one location, calls can be routed back around,” said Kevin Johnson, emergency management director for Cameron County.

In addition to the planned redundancy, the new system, “is also capable of providing transport and connectivity for systems including but not limited to: computer aided dispatch, graphical information systems (GIS), radio interoperability system and emergency management functions, including interfacing with a state-wide emergency services IP network.”

Cameron County receives an added benefit: residents in the northern section of Route 872/First Fork Road using a phone exchange of 647 will now have their calls routed directly to Elk County 911 along with the rest of Cameron County.

Residents in this area have an Austin-based phone number, and calls were previously routed to the Tioga County 911 Center, the dispatch service for Potter County residents. Previously, these calls had to be manually directed to Elk County by employees in Tioga County, making response delays a concern.

Cost savings was a major motivator for implementation of this system, the first of a series of multi-county systems planned throughout Pennsylvania.

“There’s a huge savings to this, plus other counties could pick up 911 calls while another county was offline,” Johnson said. “It’s the first project of its type to come on line in the state.”

The average cost per county for an individual system of this type would have been $394,875, for a total of more than $3.1 million for the nine-county area, and an additional $45,000 per county per year for maintenance costs.

The shared system, which increases efficiency and redundancy and brought the region up-to-date with technology, will cost approximately $162,513 per county, or $1.3 million total, and only rack up about $22,000 in maintenance costs per county.

Many rural 911 programs are finding themselves grossly underfunded due to budget cuts and the current funding structure which charges a very small fee to wireless customers. The bulk of funding to keep these communications comes from landline fees, and incoming revenue has been slashed as many customers forgo traditional phone service in favor of cellular.

Costs are broken down by population, so counties would pay an amount proportional to their usage. Counties with less people, such as Cameron and Forest, will pay significantly less than those with large populations, such as Jefferson or Clarion counties, as they will place fewer burdens on the system and receive less in revenues to pay for costs.

“Operational expenses are based on population sizes of the county,” said Johnson. “We don’t have the same call volume as the larger counties, and don’t receive the same amount in funding.”

With this new system, if 911 services are down in one location, dispatchers from another location will be able to answer the call and send necessary information to first responders “in one fluid motion between counties.”