It is a sign of the times.
The new, state-funded enhanced 911 system coming to Barton County will be more accurate and provide quicker responses from emergency personnel, but at a cost. The massive volumes of data required to make this happen have overwhelmed the three-plus-year-old computer used by County Cartographer Bj Wooding.
To satiate this ravenous need for computer memory, the County Commission Monday morning approved the purchase of a Dell Precision T3610 Workstation from Dell for $3,195.92 for the Cartography Department. It will have three three-terabyte drives and will be expandable should that become necessary.
“These are some really big files,” Wooding said. A terabyte is 1 million megabytes. To put this in prospective, Wooding said, the servers at the state level can handle petabytes, or 1,000 terabytes.
The new state-funded system, dubbed Next Generation 911 (NG911), provides improved tracking of cellular telephone calls. It will be able to handle text messages and photos, and eventually videos.
In addition, under the current network, there can be confusion on which county should respond to a 911 cell call. But, NG911 gets a location from the phone’s global positioning system chip and pulls a location from digital county maps, thus pin-pointing the location of the caller.
That’s where Wooding’s new computer and its memory come into the picture. These maps run about 50-70 megabytes each, she said.
Presently, her machine at best bogs down and at worst comes to a grinding halt.
This size is just going to keep increasing. The maps are based on aerial photography and with each new set of pictures, the resolution gets larger and larger.
Each frame of the current maps represent one square meter. The resolution will improve to a square foot and, in the near future, six square inches.
With each change, the file size grows, Wooding said. Now she will be able to process the images much faster.