Emergency center tours on tap

BEDFORD

Town officials are inviting residents to tour their local emergency police and fire communications center.

As part of National Telecommunications Week, officials will be offering tours of the Bedford Police-Fire Communications Center by appointment during the week of April 11-17.

Residents who take the tour will meet with one of the department’s six full-time dispatchers and will be shown how the dispatchers operate with various communications equipment such as the center’s new police digital radio system, said Patricia Naimo, communications supervisor at the center.

Naimo said the department has been holding the tours as part of National Telecommunications Week for about five years. She said attendance each year has steadily increased as people who are curious about the behind-the-scenes job dispatchers perform learn of the tours.

“We are the first people on the scene of a crime,” Naimo said. “Everybody knows the policeman and the fireman, but they don’t know the dispatcher.”

To make an appointment to tour the center call 472-5113.