The digital clock in the center of the Bowling Green Police Department’s Communications Center glowed a green 5:31 a.m. Sunday when a planned electrical outage plunged the room into darkness.

The communications department was ready for it. Earlier that morning, Communications Manager Malissa Carter had spent 10 minutes on the phone with BellSouth in Atlanta, getting the 911 lines switched over to Western Kentucky University’s dispatch center, and dispatchers were already waiting there to field any calls that came in.

The non-emergency line also had been forwarded, as had the National Crime Information Center teletype machine, which prints out an alert if a police officer anywhere in the country runs the information of a person wanted for a crime here in Warren County.

&#8220Everything else in here we can do without,” Carter said. &#8220We can’t take a chance on 911 service being interrupted.”

Under normal circumstances, outages like that wouldn’t cause so much as a hiccup in the busy lives of city police dispatchers, who answer phones for city police, city fire and nine volunteer fire departments, Carter said – all their equipment has a battery backup powered by a main generator and a backup generator, which charge the batteries so they can keep running indefinitely. The lights won’t even flicker, she said.

&#8220We keep on clicking and never know anything’s up,” she said. &#8220We never realize in this room that the world is without power out there.”

Sunday morning, though, as the installation of a new generator necessitated the power outage, Carter was reminded of what happened during last winter’s ice storm – Dec. 21, 2004, to be exact. Dispatchers received a call that a factory’s roof had collapsed under the weight of the ice, and the electricity abruptly shut off. The generator failed, and the dispatchers had about an hour to relocate the communications department before the battery backup ran out.

The main priority in a situation like that is to remain calm and make sure 911 service isn’t interrupted even for a second, Communications Supervisor Leisha Carr said. Dispatchers grab a box, which is packed at all times with maps, lists of contact numbers, telephone books, portable radios and batteries, among other items, and drive to WKU’s police department, where they set up shop.

&#8220Sometimes you don’t have the luxury like we did this morning, when it’s scheduled,” Carr said. &#8220We have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

The WKU Police Department and BGPD have a memorandum of understanding, Carter said, that allows each department to evacuate to the other department if needed. There are bumps in the road – WKU’s communications system isn’t as advanced as Bowling Green’s – but it’s better than being unavailable if someone calls 911, Carter said.

An hour into the relocation, Communications Supervisor Becky Burns and Advanced Telecommunicator Lori Cooper were safely ensconced inside the WKU Police Department, chatting amiably with WKU dispatcher Stephanie Shreve. The Bowling Green dispatchers were listening to portable radios instead of their regular console ones and writing everything longhand instead of typing it into their computer system, but &#8220if we do ever have to evacuate the building, this is a good test run,” Cooper said.

WKU normally takes non-emergency calls, Carter said, but dispatchers there can tell before they pick up the phone if the call will be from the 911 line or the non-emergency line. A drawback is that they don’t have caller ID for 911 calls, so if someone calls and hangs up there’s no way to get in touch with them again.

By the time the new generator had been installed and the batteries recharged, the communications center had been out of power for about seven hours, Carter said this morning, but &#8220everything went fairly well.”

&#8220It was a long day,” she said. &#8220We learned some things, we found a few things we need to update or improve in our plan, so it was a valuable experience for us.”

Carter has already started to meet with those employees involved in the relocation, she said, and will continue to ask for their feedback and ideas to improve their evacuation plans.

&#8220Everybody that was involved in the process (Sunday), we’ll all be talking to see what went well and what didn’t go so well,” she said. &#8220We talked a little (Sunday) afternoon; said ‘We should have done this,’ or ‘Next time we might do this,’ but bottom line, we had the basics that we needed – we just have to improve on some of the smaller things.”