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A Career With 911

The South Bay Regional Public Communications Authority offers exciting and rewarding career opportunities to dedicated and highly motivated individuals.  We are currently seeking 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Operators.  Minimum age 18.   High school diploma or equivalent.  Valid California driver's license.  Type 35 wpm net.  Available for shift work and overtime. Full benefits. Starting salary $3,985 to $5,289 per month.  5% educational bonus for associate, bachelor’s and/or master’s degree.  Application submission deadline of May 16, 2008.  For more information or to download an application, please go to the employment page on this web site or call (310) 973-1802 X222.                 

	Operator Stevens

During her 25 years as a public safety dispatcher, Debbie Stevens has coaxed frantic callers through CPR, directed firefighters through raging refinery fires, manned the phones during the Los Angeles riots and heard chilling confessions over the phone.  Read the whole story as reported in the Daily Breeze newspaper.

Hermosa Beach Neighborhood Watch

HERMOSA BEACH MOMS was created out of the adversities of three MOMS who recognized that they were brought to their knees with the human suffering that they had arisen from the terrorist attack on our Nation on September 11, 2001, the Asian Tsunami that killed over 100,000 people from coast to coast and then finally by Hurricane Katrina and the levee break.  Adversities are inevitable. We can quit and lose -- or we can keep trying and win. We decided to learn from the misfortunes of others and resurrected a program in Hermosa Beach that had been dismantled formally for over 30 years.  This program is the Hermosa Beach Neighborhood Watch.  In the past, Neighborhood Watch programs were designed to assist the police department with the prevention of crimes by being aware of ones’ surroundings.  Today, Neighborhood Watch programs have adopted Disaster Preparedness in their education and safety to neighbors. We have developed EDUCATION, COMMUNITY SERVICE and FUNDRAISING FOR OUR HB SCHOOLS with the establishment of Hermosa Beach MOMS and Hermosa Beach Neighborhood Watch.

Potential Threats include:

• Terrorism and bioterrorism events (at the airport, harbor or directly in Hermosa Beach)

• Disruption of basic utilities (water, power, roads, sewage)

• Epidemics (Flu, West Nile, others)

• Crime

• Natural disasters (flooding, tsunami, earthquake, storm)

Preparedness requires:

• Knowledge and education of your family

• Understanding of basic services available

• Water supply and survival kit

• First aid kit

• Updated immunizations

• Participation in Neighborhood watch

9-1-1 Network Failure

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

At approximately 2:45 a.m. this morning, the Verizon telephone system that provides 9-1-1 service to the Authority experienced a complete failure.  Verizon services the Authority’s member cities of Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach.  The cities of Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes, Lawndale, parts of Torrance and as far south as Huntington Beach were also affected. 

Verizon indicated that the system failure occurred in their main switch in Long Beach. Due to this failure, citizens dialing 9-1-1 received a voice message stating that all circuits were busy and there was no forwarding of the 9-1-1 calls to our  seven-digit lines, as would normally be the case.  The Authority also lost digital circuits at three of its transmission sites (Punta Place in Palos Verdes, Beach Cities Health District [formally South Bay Hospital] in Redondo Beach and the Grandview site in Manhattan Beach). 

Frequencies affected were Channels 4 and 5, which are used for tactical purposes, as well as Channel 8, which is the fire primary channel.  Additionally, the Parking & Animal Control channel for both Manhattan and Hermosa Beach was affected.  As a result of the failure, dispatch personnel could not communicate with the fire agencies utilizing standard console configurations.  Emergency back-up desktop radios were utilized during this period.

Members of the Authority’s Technical Services Department traveled to the Authority during the early morning hours to evaluate our systems for any localized failure.  They determined that the Authority’s systems were only being influenced by Verizon’s failure and that 9-1-1 telephone systems were inoperative in the Beach Cities.

Police and Fire Chiefs in both Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach were immediately notified of the situation while a media page was initiated to network television and radio stations to advise our Beach Cities’ citizens of the failure and provide them with the Authority’s seven-digit emergency telephone numbers.   These seven-digit lines were not affected by Verizon’s outage. 

The Community Alert Network (CAN) was initiated by the Manhattan Beach Fire Department and a Reverse 9-1-1 was conducted by the Manhattan Beach Police Department to also advise all citizens in the beach communities. 

As of 12:15 p.m., 9-1-1 calls from Manhattan Beach were transferring over to the seven-digit telephone lines in the Authority’s communications center.  The 9-1-1 calls from Hermosa Beach were being routed to the Redondo Beach communications center and then forwarded to us via direct connect hot line.

As of 1:25 p.m., all 9-1-1 systems were back on-line and operational.

VOIP 911 (Voice Over Internet) ALERT!!!

Internet Voice, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line. Even though there are advantages to this technology, emergency calls to 911 centers using these new Internet telephone services ring in through a nonemergency line and often are not answered immediately as reported in an article in USA Today.

More specifically, as noted on the web site News.com, a Florida family alleges inadequacies in Vonage's 911 Net phone service played a role in the death of their 3-month-old daughter, one of several such claims that have drawn increasing attention to a sensitive regulatory issue. To understand how 911 calls are received at emergency dispatch centers via standard phone service, please see FAQs 9-1-1.

The FCC(Federal Communications Commission) has mandated VOIP providers to provide emergency 911 service to all their customers.  See FCC News Release.

Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund

Dispatcher Kelle Eberle (left) and Stacey Ko at the SBRPCA relief fund canopy at Home Depot in Hawthorne.

On Saturday, September 3, 2005, the South Bay Regional Public Communications Authority sponsored a relief fund drive for victims of Hurricane Katrina.  The genesis behind the drive was SBRPCA Communications Operator Kelle Eberle who organized the drive in just three days and raised over $4,500 dollars which she delivered to the American Red Cross.  Also assisting Kelle from the Authority were Communications Operators Dawn Dohrmann and Tony Cordova.  The Home Depot of Hawthorne provided the location, tables and shade right at the entrance to the store.  Baked deserts were donated by Authority personnel and various businesses in the area. 

Radio Interoperability System

	New interoperability work station

In early 2005, the Authority began providing the entire South Bay, not just the member cities, with an interoperability system that allows numerous agencies to communicate with one another over a wide range of radio frequency spectrum while utilizing their own communications hardware.  In the past, agencies that utilize UHF band for their communications system could not communicate with another agency in the VHF band.  The Authority’s new system combines the various frequency bands, thereby allowing them to communicate.  The system also combines low-band, 800MHz, cellular, digital and telephone systems.

Wireless 911 (Cellular)

Cellular telephone calls to 9-1-1 in the State of California have traditionally been routed to the California Highway Patrol (CHP).  As a result, delays have occurred in processing the calls to the correct agencies responsible for the emergency response.  In an effort to mitigate these delays, the State has relegated the responsibility of developing infrastructure to receive 9-1-1 calls from local cellular users to local public safety answering points (PSAPs). 

Along these lines, several years ago the Federal Communications Commission required all cellular telephone handset manufacturers to integrate an XY global positioning system (GPS) chip into their cellular telephones to allow dispatch centers to determine the location of the cellular phone user.  To date, very few dispatch centers have developed this infrastructure and implemented this program.  However, the Authority was committed to this effort and, beginning in September 2003, the Authority began receiving wireless 9-1-1 calls.  We were able to do this with the implementation of the Authority’s new computer aided dispatch system, which is also integrated into our mapping system.  The two phases of the Wireless 9-1-1 program include the following: Phase I -  When a cellular telephone user dials 9-1-1,  the 9-1-1 call will be routed to the regional 9-1-1 center that serves the cellular transmission site; and  Phase II -  This phase actually captures the GPS location of the cellular telephone user and pinpoints it to within several hundred yards on a map in our communications center, thereby giving the communications operators a closer location for the reporting party.  Currently, all major cellular phone companies are compliant with the regulations and are all at Phase II of the project.