Livingston Parish Leads the Way with NG911

Seven Local 911 Authorities Lead the Way in Emergency Response With NG911 Revolution

Published: April 4, 2025

Despite the lessons from Hurricane Katrina and countless disasters since, most emergency communications centers remain dangerously unprepared for true, life-saving data interoperability. Now, in one day, six counties and one parish 911 authorities have made groundbreaking moves to ensure they are never caught unprepared again.

In West Virginia, Boone County Emergency Management Agency, Lincoln County 9-1-1, Logan County Emergency Operations Center, and Barbour County Office of Emergency Management 911. In Nevada, Elko County Regional Communications Center and Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office. For the latter, the worst-case scenario isn't a hypothetical-it already happened, and communications collapsed at the worst possible moment as its 911 centers were hit hard in the storm of 2016.

What happened in the Baton Rouge region back then wasn't a hurricane-but it was just as bad. In just four days, a slow-moving storm dumped more than 31 inches of rain across Livingston Parish, resulting in more accumulation than the water left behind during Katrina, washing out critical infrastructure and leaving an entire region stranded.

Livingston lost all communication except voice and radio for days due to the floodwaters. Try to picture it: Floodwaters rising fast, your entire 911 system underwater, and the only way to save your critical servers is to carry them out by hand.

In this blog, you'll discover exactly how Livingston Parish is revolutionizing its emergency communications with NG911 technology and how your local emergency services could learn from Louisiana's experience-before disaster strikes.

Improving Emergency Response: Lessons from the 2016 Livingston Parish Flood

1Spatial's director of public safety Sandi Stroud had the opportunity as a consultant to assist the NAPSG Foundation in coordinating and executing an after-action workshop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Jan. 18, 2017, where a group of first responders, emergency management leaders, and GIS professionals discussed the catastrophic flooding that hit Livingston Parish in August 2016.

During the NAPSG event, the details of this process were discussed. The parish 911 center had to call the network provider to have calls "abandoned" to East Baton Rouge 911. This process typically can take 30 to 60 minutes before calls start flowing.

When Livingston Parish residents made 911 calls, the details were received by East Baton Rouge 911. However, due to data interoperability challenges with the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems, the information could not be directly transferred electronically.

Consequently, the call details had to be manually written on paper, highlighting a significant inefficiency in the emergency response process. This manual method not only slowed down the response time but also increased the potential for errors, underscoring the need for improved technological integration between the systems.

Within days, the National Guard, Coast Guard, State Police, emergency management agencies, and the Cajun Navy were called in to assist in the rescues. Many of these groups were represented at the NAPSG after-action event, and one of the issues communicated was the difficulty in taking those paper lists of 911 calls and organizing a way to follow up on them. Interoperability issues were high on the list of issues to tackle to be better prepared in the future.

So, on March 23, 2025, Livingston Parish 911 took a bold move to ensure that, if this type of flooding happened again, they would be ready and interoperable with other 911 centers.

Pioneering NG911 Interoperability for Future-Proof Emergency Response

Today, Livingston Parish is among a pioneering few taking steps to future-proof their emergency response-while many others remain vulnerable. As they undertook this massive update, the 911 director, Jack Varnardo, is quoted as saying, "Our IT director had to physically wade into our 911 center, pull the entire computer-aided dispatch (CAD) server out, carrying it through rising water to put it in his vehicle to get it to higher ground." Jack continued, "Then it took him several days to set it back up and get it running again. It was good that he could do that, of course, but we realized then that we needed to do something different because during that flood, we had just nothing but paper logs."

The parish is now just one of seven 911 authorities in the country to submit a valid request to the FCC, notifying all of the originating service providers with subscribers in their network footprint that they have the NG911 capabilities in place to support the requirements a 911 authority needs to meet for both a phase one- and phase two-valid request.

For an OSP, this means that they have six months to a year to meet the phase one requirements and then another six months to a year to meet the phase two requirements unless the parish meets the threshold of being able to skip phase one.

These FCC requests are like the first onlooker around a frozen lake taking a step on the ice to see if it's going to sustain weight. All OSPs should be taking steps to ensure they will be able to fulfill their requirements of a valid phase one request and valid phase two request of supporting a LIS.

One of the most complex hurdles an OSP will have to breach is supporting two different database structures until every 911 authority across the country has made this conversion.

Our 1Locate solution can solve this for any OSP or VPC right now, or offer the ability for a 911 authority to do so on their behalf.

For Livingston Parish, this means that they have reached the end-state NG911 architecture, and due to their efforts in striving for optimal interoperability, they will be better equipped to address this type of disaster in the future.

Join 1Spatial's Public Safety team at Network X Americas - the premier gathering for industry stakeholders eager to stay at the forefront of telecom innovation - on May 20-22 in Dallas, TX. Whether over coffee or in our booth, engage directly with our team to discover why true NG911 data interoperability matters.