Martha’s Vineyard 911 calls follow separate routes to one destination

Island communication center officials said cell phone calls are routed to the mainland and received within seconds.

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At a moment’s notice, an emergency can occur, and when it does, the immediate and recommended response is to call 911. On Martha’s Vineyard, the call will follow one of two signal routes, depending on whether it was made on a landline or a cellphone — increasingly the norm, particularly for summer visitors.

All Island emergency calls, be it for medical, police, or fire emergencies — or less urgent calls that may include loose dogs or cows on a road — are fielded by the men and women who staff the Duke’s County Communication Center 24/7, in a small building located just off the entrance road to the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, under the direction of Sheriff Mike McCormack.

The dispatchers are responsible for communication with 66 different agencies, including the Island’s six police and fire departments, four ambulance services, State Police, and Environmental Police. On a daily basis, the most frequent calls involve house alarms and medical emergencies.

Nicole Gazaille, assistant supervisor, has been a dispatcher for the past 18 years. It is a job that requires her to be constantly on her toes, and ready to react at a flip of a switch.

“A normal day? There is no normal day, unfortunately,” Ms. Gazaille said in a recent interview. “Every day is different; every day you sit in this chair, you take what comes in to that phone, and deal with what comes in on the other end.”

Calls made on a landline from an Island exchange go directly to the communications center. The reverse 911 phone system allows dispatchers to immediately see the address — house number and street number — where a call originated. That is particularly useful when the caller is a renter in an unfamiliar house down an unfamiliar dirt road.

Cell phone calls are first routed to the mainland, then rerouted to the Island communications center. This is because Martha’s Vineyard does not have a wireless PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point).

“All of our cell calls go to Middleboro,” Ms. Gazaille explained. “A dispatcher in Middleboro asks where your location is, and then they automatically route it to us.”

According to Ms. Gazaille, it takes less than a second to have the call rerouted to the communications center. With improved wireless signals across the Island, not the case in the past when people would call the communications center business line, cell phones are vital in an emergency. Ms. Gazaille and Mr. McCormack strongly advise people to use their cell phones and call 911 in an emergency.

“Back in the day when cell service wasn’t great, we would always tell people to call our business line,” Ms. Gazaille said. “We would like to discourage that now, because of the GPS availability; if they call the business line, I have no way of seeing where they pinged. If they don’t know where they are, I have no access to a mapping system to pinpoint where they would be. If they don’t know where they are, I can at least look on the map and see the GPS coordinates.”

In an emergency situation, pinpointing location is one of the most important first steps for dispatching first responders. Without a good location, emergency personnel have no idea where to go, and the emergency, whatever it may be, could worsen.

“The message here today is that we encourage everybody who has an emergency, whether on a cell phone of a landline to call 911,” Mr. McCormack said. “And no other number.”