Westmoreland 911 center has 2 coronavirus cases

Westmoreland County’s 911 dispatching operations were split into two operational locations Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning after officials discovered two employees tested positive for coronavirus.

Public Safety Director Roland Mertz said 911 operations were uninterrupted even as the county instituted mitigation efforts and implemented its emergency response plan to deal with a potential outbreak among staff.

“We’re dealing with it the best we can,” Mertz said. “We have been planning for this and knew this was just a matter of time.”

The county’s 911 center is located on Donahoe Road in Hempfield, where a staff of more than 50 dispatchers and supervisors, working in shifts, field emergency calls in a large room filled with individual work stations.

Once notified about the diagnosed employees, county officials moved some dispatchers to an off-site, unidentified location about a 10-minute drive from the public safety headquarters. Others stayed behind and were spaced out as a private company completed a deep cleaning and sanitized the 911 center, Mertz said.

All dispatchers returned to the 911 center Wednesday afternoon after a second cleaning was completed.

Mertz said doctors from Excela Health in Greensburg were consulted as to how dispatching operations can safely continue following the newly diagnosed cases, the first that the public safety department has had since the onset of the pandemic.

County officials said the employees who tested positive have been quarantined and contact tracing is ongoing to determine who else might have been exposed to the virus.

Dispatchers and other employees at the public safety building are required to wear masks and temperature checks are conducted when staff arrives for work. Those precautions remained in place Wednesday.