It was April 11th, 2011, and I was the dispatch supervisor at Prosper PD, and a hailstorm came through and I knew I had one girl working. So I jumped in the car and drove up to dispatch. And when I walked in, the phones were ringing off the hook. There was one dispatcher and an officer who had gone into dispatch to help her. And, there was about an inch of water on the ground. I grabbed my headset and started helping out.
The only thing that worked throughout the entire evening was the ICS software. We were able to put in calls and send officers and fire departments where they needed to go to handle things. At one point, we had Collin County and Frisco calling us over the radio because we couldn't get our 9-1-1 calls. However, we were able to put information into our Athena CAD and mobile software and send officers and fire department to rescue anybody that needed to be rescued.
If ICS hadn't kept up and done its job during that time with everything else that was falling down around us. I don't know what we would have done, but with Athena CAD and Mobile staying up...allowing us to put in the information we needed to put in...we survived. We survived the hailstorm of 2011.