Honolulu Plans Huge EOC

The city of Honolulu (Hi.) has proposed construction of a huge, 10-story, $73 million, 295,000 square-foot emergency operations and traffic management center in the downtown area to consolidate communications and management functions for the island. The center will merge police, fire, EMS and traffic management administrative operations, and could open by 2012 on a 4-acre site at Alapa’i and King streets. The current EOC was built in 1975 and renovated most recently in 2001. The building would have six floors of offices, four parking levels and be built to withstand any type of natural disaster. The EOC would have 80 consoles for various city departments during an emergency. City officials are unsure if the currently-separate police, fire and EMS dispatch operations would be moved to the proposed building, although they would have spaces in the EOC during critical incidents.