WASHINGTON COUNTY, Md. (WDVM) — Improvements to NextGen 911 are constantly being made for residents who need help. In a recent Washington County Board of Commissioners Meeting, a proposal presented by the Planning and Zoning GIS department was made so towns with similar street names don’t clash.
“We don’t want to have any duplicate addresses. For example, Hagerstown has a “High Street”, and Hancock has a High Street. Sometimes that can get confused if a call is in distress when they’re calling in. They might not say they’re in Hancock, and we would dispatch someone to Hagerstown in “High Street”, “10 High Street” in Hagerstown, and it was in Hancock,” said Brian Albert, assistant director of emergency communications at the Washington County Emergency Communications Center.
Mechanisms are in place to try to take care of getting the correct address.
“We have to verify it three times when someone’s on the call. They’ll ask what’s your address, and then they’ll verify it and then they verified it at the end. That’s so we get the right information for the address and we can send help to the correct place,” Albert said.
NextGen 911 now can even take text messages. New updates within the Washington County Division of Emergency Services include the process of building out Ezi Net, specific for emergency providers in the nation.
“Everything will be routed through IP addresses the calls that come into the number one center, said Albert.
