Alaska city turns to cloud to enhance emergency dispatch services

John Elk via Getty Images

After losing power from a windstorm and a hurricane in recent years, the Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center is tapping into cloud technology to ensure dispatch services won’t be disrupted during future events.

For rural communities, relying on neighboring cities to help during times of crisis isn’t always guaranteed, according to one Alaska city official, whose government has turned to the cloud to strengthen and protect its emergency dispatch services against potential power outages. 

In the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, “we don’t have a lot of resources that are close to us,” said Kristi Meredith, dispatch manager at the Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center. “The next biggest city is 356 miles away … you can very easily be cut off from anybody.” 

Meredith recalled a windstorm several years ago that pushed the local power company to shut off power as the storm resulted in fires across the community, leaving Fairbanks’ dispatch center unable to operate. The facility’s uninterruptible power supply and generator also gave out during the ordeal, disrupting communications across 22 emergency dispatch centers in Alaska. 

“We had no power and no way to fix it … since we were on-prem,” she said. 

In the meantime, emergency personnel had to connect to each other without the help of the dispatch center. Officers relied on their cellphones and pen and paper to track where fires were and how staff were responding to the situation, Meredith said. 

The storm “took us out of the equation,” she said. “We were no help at all.”

Fairbanks met a similar fate when an earthquake last year disrupted their services for four hours, prompting officials to take action to prevent future disruptions. 

To protect the city against the impacts of another power outage, Fairbanks officials decided that migrating its dispatch services to the cloud would help staff maintain efficiency and stay connected during such instances. 

In August 2024, the city started working with CentralSquare Technologies to start the process, which Meredith said concluded this April. With the cloud, Fairbanks can eliminate the need to keep its two on-prem servers, reducing the costs of maintaining their own. 

Fairbanks was able to redeploy its current dispatch database into the company’s cloud systems, which is supported by Amazon Web Services, in seven minutes, said Ashya Comes, cloud director of product management at CentralSquare Technologies. 

With the platform, daily workflows have not changed significantly, Meredith said. But now if the building’s power goes down, dispatch staff can continue working remotely, which is crucial for maintaining the workflow of emergency personnel, Meredith said. 

Plus, the management of the cloud servers can be done by CentralSquare Technologies, including intrusion detection and other security measures, to allow Fairbanks staff to focus on their day-to-day operations, Comes said.

Beyond the cloud platform, Fairbanks is also building a backup center and is considering leveraging satellite internet resources, Meredith said. “You have to have a backup to a backup,” she explained.

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