Mayor Honors 911 Center Manager
As This Week’s Friday’s Hero

April 23, 2010

On Friday, Mayor Richard J. Berry honored Erika Wilson, Emergency Communications Center Manager for the Albuquerque Police Department as this week’s Friday’s Hero. Ms. Wilson is being recognized for her efforts and management of a crisis involving three separate incidents of communication outages at the 911 Center within a five day period.

On Thursday, April 8, Saturday, April 10 and Monday, April 12, there were several time frames for which there were interruptions in service causing the communications system to shut down. Despite the high stress nature of the events, Erika kept her composure and dealt with the situation like a true leader. Each time, Erika took immediate action to ensure that 911 calls were not lost but rather intercepted by the city’s 242-COPS line or the Bernalillo County Communications Center and by reassigning city personnel to other call centers. After ensuring that citizens’ emergency calls for service would still be answered, Erika called on internal personnel to help identify the problems as well as made contact with the provider and relayed to them that the situation was critical and required immediate action. Erika was professional but aggressive in her response and did not hesitate to bring the matter to the highest levels within the service provider’s organization in order to restore service to the 911 center as soon as possible. In each case, because of Erika’s quick action, service was restored within hours.

The outages were the result of issues with the service provider which they assured the city they would resolve. Once the various problems were identified over the course of several days, Erika did not rest until all the proper actions were taken and equipment was in place to make certain that further disruptions did not occur. At one point she volunteered to drive on her own to meet a FedEx truck carrying computer hubs ordered by the provider that were a necessary component of the long term solution to the communications problems.

“The job that our dispatchers do at every level is critical to public safety in Albuquerque and I am grateful for their service. Ms. Wilson’s actions reflect how dedicated she is to this profession and to ensuring that the citizens of Albuquerque are never without critical emergency services.”