Calhoun County upgrades outdated emergency management systems

MORGAN – Calhoun County’s 9-1-1 dispatch and first responder teams are getting a system makeover.

New software will allow them to handle emergency situations more quickly and effectively – a huge step for a county that was dispatching manually for 10 different agencies until the present.

The county’s 9-1-1 center implemented Ryzyliant’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system and mapping system that increases location accuracy and reduces response times. Ryzyliant is a start-up that develops public safety systems for emergency response centers. It’s based in Alabama, and its systems have been used throughout Georgia, Alabama, West Virginia and Tennessee.

Ryzyliant has quite the footprint in southwest Georgia as well, serving Randolph, Mitchell, Baker, Early and other counties.

Calhoun County is also upgrading its emergency management agency from an analog radio system to a digital system.

Both Jamie Sauls, the county’s EMS director, and Richard Martin, the county’s EMA director, said the new systems will benefit everyone in the county.

Sauls said the 9-1-1 center has been using the same phone and radio system since at least 2014, which allowed dispatch to answer emergency calls and see the location and phone number of the caller. The team would then record dispatch information – times, location, etc. – by paper and pen. This meant the county only had paper copies of vital information.

She said it was clear the system was outdated for quite some time. However, in June 2023 a lightning strike event took down vital parts of the original system. The county’s Board of Commissioners voted to implement a new one.

“We needed to step up our system,” Sauls said. “We went with Ryzyliant because they have an almost all-in-one package.”

The Ryzyliant system still shows the caller’s location and phone number but also provides a county map that automatically displays where the call is coming from. This information is then automatically loaded into the CAD system.

Sauls said dispatchers were all trained to use the CAD system. She said her favorite part is that when one department is dispatched, all of the members of that department receive a text message detailing what’s going on and providing a link that displays the caller’s location on Google maps.

“So with our fire and EMS, that’s a big help as far as volunteers – people who don’t have radios,” she said. “Everybody has their phone, so now they get a text message.”

Overall, Sauls said the systems get first responders to where they’re needed faster and allow for more accurate record-keeping.

She said Ryzyliant’s system price was also affordable for a county as small as Calhoun County.

Craig Dollar, Ryzyliant’s founder, president and CEO, said Ryzyliant specially designs systems for smaller, rural counties. He said most 9-1-1 systems are not made for these communities in both scale and cost.

Dollar said these underserved and underfunded rural counties can’t afford the 9-1-1 dispatch systems that support larger metro areas. So the company developed technology that puts all of the 9-1-1 dispatch components into one operating function, creating a more affordable system that makes sense for a county the size of Calhoun.

“The types of crimes and calls that are happening in Atlanta aren’t changing in rural counties,” he said. “They have the same crimes and calls just less of them.”

Sauls said the 9-1-1 Center responds to an average of 160 to 200 calls a month.

Calhoun County’s former system was one of the most outdated Dollar’s seen, he said. This new technology brings them “up to the times” with state-of-the-art systems.

Sauls said the 9-1-1 center is adjusting to the new system now. Parts of it are still being installed, and officials expect the last component – radio — to be complete by the end of 2024.

As far as the EMA’s switch from analog to digital radios, Martin said it will be the first change to the radio system in about 30 years. The new system is more secure. With an analog system, people are able to listen in on frequencies.

“Folks could actually buy home scanners and put our frequencies in and monitor radio traffic from fire, police and EMS – stuff that needs to be kept private sometimes,” he said.

Martin said the emergency response teams want to avoid having people show up on the scene of an emergency. The new digital system has channels that are private to dispatch – allowing them to communicate privately among each other. There also will be walkie-talkies for fire, police, EMS and the sheriff’s office.

He said the county also had only one communication tower for emergency response in Morgan for the whole county. This became a problem when there would be emergency situations in other parts of the county.

“With our terrain, it’s hard for those radio signals to bounce back all the way to Morgan,” he said.

The new system will have a central radio repeater located in Morgan and radio repeaters in Edison, Arlington and Leary as well. Martin said this will create better communication capabilities. He said the emergency response teams stay busy with about 10 to 12 fire calls a month and daily calls for ambulance, sheriff and police forces.

He said he hopes the new system will go live in the next 30 to 40 days.

He asked that Calhoun County citizens to give the EMA time to adapt to the new technology.

“Once we get all the bugs out, it’ll be working way better than what we got now,” Martin said.

Photo Credit to DeDe LangePhoto credit to DeDe Lange