HELENA — In April of last year, Lewis and Clark County experienced a 911 outage. This year the 911 Communications Center has goals of establishing a permanent second location in the event of a disaster.
Zach Slattery is the 911 operations manager for the area and says, “The event that happened in April of 2024 really highlighted the need for us to have a secondary permanent location."
In outages, Lewis and Clark 911 dispatchers were able to take calls through other jurisdictions.
Although helpful in an emergency, Lewis and Clark 911 is always busy, receiving over 120 thousand calls through 911 and nonemergency in 2024.
Planning for the secondary location is in the early stages.
Slattery says, “That is one of the things we have been working on is trying to identify a location would be different or a good enough distance from our current facility should something like a natural disaster happen that we would not lose both centers.”
Dispatchers are responsible for Helena Police Department, East Helena Police Department, Lewis and Clark County Sheriff's Office, three ambulance services, Helena Fire Department, and 16 volunteer fire departments.
Once the secondary location is established it will not just be used as a backup facility.
“When we go through every quarter we are probably going to have our staff go over there and work a shift from that location so that we can always keep our equipment up to date, tested, and ensure connectivity is still working," Slattery says.
Currently, Lewis and Clark 911 has 14 dispatchers and two minimum on shift at a time, working to keep our community safe.
“We are pretty proud of the fact that we have been fully staffed for almost a year now," noted Slattery.
The secondary permanent center is not the only plan for 2025.
“Now looking into the future, looking to see if we can increase the amounts for positions we could have," Slattery said.
As the center continues to search for a secondary location they are also working to get grant money to move the plans forward.
