CRAWFORD COUNTY, ARKANSAS, Ark. — Final preparations are being made to move equipment and staff into the new Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) adjacent to the Crawford County Justice Center in Van Buren, according to officials.
The move to consolidate all county dispatchers into the new multi-million dollar single facility off Highway 64 comes from the Arkansas Public Safety Act of 2019.
"The state mandated several of the counties consolidate across the state,” Crawford County Judge Chris Keith said. "So we were one of the first to get our consolidation done and from then to this point, we've been operating out of the justice center."
Keith says the building, which has three full-time employees staffed for every shift, is technologically and structurally advanced, allowing dispatchers to do their critical jobs during the worst of storms.
"It is built to withstand an F5 tornado," Keith said. "So, anytime there's a tornado or something, an F5 tornado will bounce off of it. Our tower is built to withstand 130-mile-an-hour winds, and we also have generator backup on this as well."
Director of 911 Operations for Crawford County Hunter Wiley said Tuesday’s storms caused some concern in getting supplies moved over to the new building.
"We had a tree blocking one of the entrances, the other entrance was blocked by powerlines," Wiley said.
Wiley added that crews were able to get the trees and powerlines cleared up, and daily operations were able to go on without major delays. While power was out, Wiley said they were working on the backup generator.
While the move to the new building continues, Wiley said they are still able to contact emergency services but are partnering with Scott County until fully operational.
"We have a kind of partnership and an agreement with Scott County," Wiley said. "We have a dispatcher that's down there answering calls for us, putting it into our system, which we can see here. And we can dispatch the calls out, so there's not any delayed response times or anything like that.”
Wiley added this building will bring efficiency to the county’s response time.
According to Wiley, there used to be three PSAPs in the county, and dispatchers used to have to transfer the calls to the proper authorities.
“Now, if a call comes in, it doesn't matter where it's at in the county, we can handle it," Wiley said. "There's not any transferring around or anything, so response times should be better and not a delay in any services needed."
Keith added that once Internet tests are complete, the new building should be fully staffed, operational, and running in the near future. Wiley said he believes that time will come within the next week.
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