Disaster Operations and the Communications Center 2nd Edition

Sunday November 9 & Monday November 10, 2025

APCO’s Disaster Operations and the Communications Center, 2nd Ed. is a comprehensive course designed for public safety communications professionals.

This course serves to educate telecommunicators and other ECC staff on a wide range of topics, beginning with the issues they face ensuring continuity of operations for the comm center itself. From there, the course looks at the role of the ECC in emergency operations plans and how local and state plans fit into the larger scheme of U.S. homeland security and national response doctrines on disaster readiness and recovery. The course also looks at specific issues related to many disaster situations.

As public safety’s ability and need to address disaster situations evolves, the telecommunicator needs to be familiar with all types of disasters – man-made and natural – and how those events can impact public safety communications as well as the communities they serve. The course features practical exercises and scenario training.

Topics include:

• Preparation and Prevention
• National Concepts of Disaster Relief, Response, and Readiness
• Disaster Planning and Preparedness for the Communications Center
• Overview of Systems, Tools, and Resources
• Operations During Natural Disasters
• Operations During Man-Made Disasters
• Disaster Exercises for the Communications Center

Crisis Negotiations for Telecommunicators 2nd Edition

Monday November 10, 2025

The telecommunicator is the first voice in any crisis, the first point of contact the caller has with public safety, and sometimes the first contact a person in crisis has had with anybody in a long time. Crisis negotiation calls are truly life or death incidents for the caller and, perhaps, for others involved in the incident. These calls are unlike emergencies that telecommunicators handle every day. A crisis does not have a clearcut response plan, its nature and outcome are hard to discern. There is no way to know how long it will take to resolve or by what means. Outcomes depend on the way responders interact with the person on the other end of the phone. Clearly not an on-the-job training situation, the best preparation for telecommunicators is training as much as possible before they have to handle a crisis call.

This course builds on all the skills of basic telecommunicator training but has the specific goal of diving deeper into the nature of crises, their progression, and the most effective way to receive and process calls. Within its scope, the course provides an overview of crisis negotiations looking at the special concerns related to hostage situations, barricaded subjects, and persons with suicidal intent. By the end of the course, the student will have both conceptual tools to help understand crisis situations, they will also have tools to use when working to resolve these incidents.

Topics include:

• The reasons a person may experience a crisis
• The stages and timeframes of the crisis state
• Verbal communication and interrogation techniques used during crisis negotiations
• Dealing with demands
• Handling negotiations
• Hostage and suicidal subject situations