Town acquires its own emergency arsenal

MANCHESTER, Conn. (WTNH) -- The town of Manchester is beefing up its emergency response arsenal.
    
When a disgruntled employee shot and killed eight people at Hartford Distributors in Manchester two years ago, the town had to bring in a mobile command post all the way from Newington, which is on the West side of the Connecticut River, to deal with the crisis.
      
That will no longer be the case as the Capitol region, which is East of the river, now finally has it's own mobile command post.
      
The new mobile command post was purchased by Manchester with a federal grant. It will be kept in South Windsor, ready to be dispatched.
      
It can also be used for weather emergencies, like last year's devastating storms that caused massive damage and power outages, when communication problems were rampant.
      
The new command post has tremendous modern communication capabilities.

"It has radio and all that sort of thing, but it also has WiFi and WiFi can connect to our citywide fiber optic network, which, in turn, can connect to other things, like devices in people's pockets," said Jack McCoy from Manchester Information Systems.
     
In a case like the Hartford Distributors shooting it would allow commanders to know at all times where every police office is.    
     
In addition, the region now also has a state of the art armored vehicle to replace an out of date,  30-year-old military surplus truck.

"These are assets that no municipality could afford to purchase on their own, but working as a group, we are able to bring in these assets on a regular basis," said Manchester Police Chief Marc Montminy.
    
Federal and town money also funded the new, state of the art regional emergency operations center as well, all ready for the next emergency.