On Wednesday August 6th the Honorable Minister of Justice Dennis Richardson visited the facilities which is presently in its stages of completion and will be used as a joint emergency center for all emergency services on the Dutch side of the island. This dispatch center is a project that has been financed by USONA and will be an ultra modern state of the art facility. There is only one other joint dispatch center like this one in the Netherlands which dispatch center has proven to be very effective and successful. The one on Sint Maarten will be the second one in the Kingdom. As a joint emergency dispatch center, which will offer a 24 hour service, will have all emergency calls come in at one central location from where any specific emergency service can immediately be dispatched or from where several emergency services can simultaneously be dispatched to deal with a specific emergency.
In this manner the communication and coordination between emergency services will drastically improve, which in turn will contribute to a much better response time to any emergency. The dispatch center will consist of 6 dispatch terminals. Several meetings between the head and other representatives of ambulance department and the police management team were held and working agreements between these two services have already been signed. All Emergency Dispatch personnel will be highly trained in the new -911- software and will be qualified to handle any type of emergency situation. The Chief of Police Peter de Witte and Acting Chief of Police Carl John, police advisor Klaas Groen, Head of the Police Central Dispatch Chief Inspector Benjamin Gout, Cyl Richardson head of the Ambulance Department were all present during the visit to the dispatch center. The Minister of Justice was quite happy and impressed with what was shown to him and commended the police management team for their good work and encouraged them to continue with their great work. The dispatch center, at an earlier stage, was also visited by the Honorable Minister of Public Health and Social Welfare Cornelius De Weever who applauded the great efforts there were being made to bring all emergency services together.
