No one likes it when you can hear “Susan” giggling into her phone in the corner. Especially when you are a 911 dispatcher on the phone and the person on the other end is in a potential life or death situation. Those giggles are the absolute last thing you need breaking your concentration and adding to an already stressful situation. When you are in a high stress job such as Dispatching, background noise and distractions are the last thing you want to hear. You need to stay focused and alert to the situation at hand.

Acoustical panel systems are one of the ways that you can keep the noises of a 911 Communications Center at bay. Standard "cubical" panels usually have a .55 NRC rating and the panels that offer a .75 NRC rating would be considered a "premium" acoustical solution. Now, you are probably scratching your head wondering what those numbers actually mean.

Have you ever heard noise in your headset while you are trying to talk on the phone or talk on the radio?

If you answered yes to these questions, you have a grounding issue in your dispatch center.

There are a number of acceptable methods to correctly bond and ground a building, electrical cabling and equipment. The most common misconception about grounding is that, what you currently have for grounding, is good enough. But, there is no such thing as too much grounding. 

As we know, a 911 dispatch center can have many distractions for dispatchers. Noise often carries and reflects throughout a room and is audible in even the furthest reaching corner of the room. It can start with a casual disruption like “hey, what are we getting for lunch?”, to a full blown “calm down sir, help is on the way!” Often times, dispatchers raise their voice so that they can be heard with clarity by the caller and sometimes side conversations tend carry when they are even whispered.