Another component of updating the Butler County 911 radio dispatch system is complete.
County Emergency Services Director Steve Bicehouse said the new CAD- or computer aided dispatch- system went live Tuesday.
“We developed a four-county computer-aided dispatching program in conjunction with Lawrence, Mercer and Venango counties,” Bicehouse said in an interview Wednesday.
The program allows the sharing of resources via maintenance and hardware. Also, if something were to ever happen that disabled operations at the Butler County 911 Center, personnel could go to another county’s 911 center, sign in, and dispatch Butler County units.
Bicehouse says this is all about upgrading technology. The county was mandated to update their 911 system because the current equipment will no longer be supported.
“The CAD system that we had in place was put in in 2004. It’s older technology. It’s more prone to failure. You can’t update it. It doesn’t have a lot of the functionality that this new system has,” he said.
This CAD upgrade is a part of the bigger project to update the county’s entire 911 radio dispatch system. The entire project is expected to cost at least $10 million. The project has been years in the making.