Changing call patterns, continuing to use busy signals and educating the public are among the measures officials said may prevent overloads of the county’s 911 system.

Warren County officials are trying to establish a better protocol to deal with the occasional high volume of calls, which usually occur during weather-related emergencies, according to Paul Kindell, director of telecommunications for Warren County.

Currently, when all lines are busy at Warren County’s dispatch center, the calls are re-routed to Franklin’s dispatch center.

Kindell wants to do away with the switchover to Franklin’s dispatch center, because he believes the process does more harm than good.

The Warren County Communications Center 911 calls have the potential to flood the Franklin dispatch, who may only have one dispatcher working, Kindell said. Franklin’s dispatch has a difficult time getting the calls rerouted from Warren County back to the dispatchers because anytime the fail-safe system kicks in, the county’s dispatch center is already swamped with incoming calls, he said.

“It creates a sort of round robin with Franklin,” Kindell said. “We overflow to them, they overflow to us.”

When lines to Franklin’s dispatch center are maxed out, callers receive a pre-recorded “all circuits are busy” recording. When those lines are full, callers receive only a busy tone.

“We don’t want anybody to call 911 and get a busy signal. But to guarantee that you don’t, you’d have to put 30 dispatchers or more in the room and eventually it still might happen,” said Warren County Administrator Dave Gulley.

Studies show that a busy signal is actually preferable over allowing a call to continue ringing, according to Mike Bunner, Warren County Emergency Services Director.

The busy signal will usually “weed out” callers without imminent emergencies — such as people who call about a tree down in their yard — while people with life-threatening emergencies will continue to call until they receive a dispatcher, Bummer said.

“I’m not a fan of the callers receiving a busy signal, but with the system parameters being what they are, I understand why it is used,” Bunner said.

The telecommunications center is also educating the public about alternatives to 911 in the case of non-emergencies, Bunner said.

The Warren County Dispatch’s non-emergency number is (513) 925-2525.

Warren County was left without 911 service for more than 14 hours in the wake of a catastrophic windstorm in late June. An overloaded system and understaffed technicians unfamiliar with how to fix the problem were among the issues that led to the June outage, according to a report from the county in early August.