At any time, from any place, a call can come in.

It could be the distressed voice of someone whose spouse or child has suddenly stopped breathing or someone who smells smoke. Perhaps it’s a burglary in progress and the perpetrators are still in sight.

In emergencies, information can be key to either saving a life or solving a crime. Once Vicksburg Warren E-911 moves to its new Clay Street headquarters next year, gathering that information will be easier.

Questions dispatchers ask are part of a protocol followed by the National Academies of Emergency Dispatch, a Utah-based standard-setting organization for all aspects of emergency dispatch. Now, the questions are listed on three bulky tablets at dispatcher workstations in a cramped room in the basement of the Warren County Courthouse. Dispatchers thumb through to find the right questions to guide them and callers through more than 100 specific emergencies.

Michael Gaul, the E-911 Dispatch Center’s deputy director of operations said it may be among the less-noticed changes, but the tablets will fade into history when dispatch operations move to new facilities in 2007.

&#8220The entire system will be automated,” he said. &#8220It will simply be a drop-down menu on their screens and will help us sift through information quicker.”

Callers are sometimes irked, but questions dispatchers ask are geared to &#8220set up the scenario” for law enforcement, fire and medical personnel, Gaul said.

&#8220I think we can educate the public as to why we ask these questions,” he said.

The center is undergoing its first major overhaul of its technical capabilities in 12 years, with the cost reaching about $800,000, funding in last year’s Warren County budget.

The bulk of the upgrade is enhanced radio and mapping equipment that, among shoring up other basic call-identifying functions, will fill a big need by pinpointing calls made from cell phones.

&#8220We will be able to triangulate between towers to find out where a person is,” Gaul said.

With &#8220land lines” or wired phones, dispatchers get immediate information about the address of the caller. But times have changed. Dispatch Center Director Geoffrey Greetham has estimated about 60 percent of all emergency calls are now made from cell phones.

If a caller doesn’t know where he or she is, dispatchers are at a loss on where to send help. The upgrade, required for all dispatch centers, will solve that problem.

In July, supervisors awarded a bid to Grenada-based Jones-Zander, Ltd. to put together a plan to renovate the former Southern Printing building at First North and Clay streets purchased from the city of Vicksburg in March for $230,000.

Supervisors are expected to execute a contract with the firm Oct. 16 to give the go-ahead for physical work to start.

A raised floor on the bottom tier will house emergency operations, with the top floor serving as storage space for the county’s touch-screen voting machines.

Aside from the technical improvements to the call-receiving functions, the building itself must be outfitted to accommodate them before E-911 staff can move there. Upgrades are needed to the electrical system to handle both the computers and the air conditioning system, plus separate additions like a new communication tower and a backup generator. Both Gaul and Greetham remain hopeful the dispatch operation can move by April from the basement room where leaks through roofing tiles earlier this year provided an added distraction.

While they wait, both men point to changes made since they were hired 18 months ago. All supervisory staff and dispatchers now wear uniforms, a change from a T-shirt and jeans atmosphere Gaul said persisted before.

Employee handbooks have been updated, and applications for employment are now online, Gaul said. Training is also an integral part of a dispatcher’s employment there, with more call-situation testing at the point of hiring.

&#8220Before, the doors were turning too fast. Now, if you don’t have specific skills, you’re not going to work out,” Gaul said, adding that the last two hires were made out of a pool of 30 applicants.

New hires in dispatching must complete a 40-hour telecommunications training program by the Association of Public Communications Officers Institute to be certified dispatchers, as well as 8-hour ride-along sessions with the agency they are to dispatch, whether it be the Vicksburg Police Department, the Vicksburg Fire Department or the Warren County Sheriff’s Department.

The certification is valid for three years. In the interim, they must complete 48 hours of continuing education credits, such as learning second languages or CPR.

At the end of the three years, they can be recertified by taking 16-hour classes that cover any new information, such as updates to the National Academies protocol, Gaul said.

Currently, 16 of 17 dispatcher slots are filled with interviews scheduled for the last one, Gaul said.

In a 1989 referendum, Warren County voters approved adding a surcharge to their phone bills to pay for the centralized system. While that surcharge continues per-line on wired and cell numbers, an increasing subsidy has been paid from Vicksburg and Warren County general funds.

Last year’s budget, up for the equipment purchase, was $1.8 million. This year’s budget is $1.2 million, with about $600,000 coming from the surcharge, $410,115 from city funds and $221,115 from county funds.