Inside the underground nerve center of Israel’s first responders
TEL AVIV—The main nerve center for Israel’s primary emergency service might resemble any dispatch center in any American city—
a hive of uniformed first responders surrounded by expanses of ceiling-height monitors and computers.
But Magen David Adom’s dispatch unit in Ramla, about 12 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, lies more than 100 feet underground, protected by thick walls and a sophisticated respiratory system capable of providing clean air in case of conventional and non-conventional attacks.
You wouldn’t imagine any other emergency services in the world, including civilian emergency services, working in a shelter. But for us, it’s a necessity— a basic need,” said Uri Shacham, MDA’s deputy director and chief of staff. He said of the role of MDA, “This was to make sure that no matter what happens outside, no matter how challenging the situation, this brain actually continues to function.”
When NBC News visited the facility Tuesday, the mood seemed busy but comfortable as about a dozen uniformed dispatchers handled phone calls and planned routes for emergency vehicles on a series of screens.
Soon, phones began buzzing with reports of projectiles coming from Iran. It appears that as soon as this warning came to the attention of dispatchers, it reached citizen phones just as quickly.
Within minutes, green ovals indicating the missiles’ probable destination appeared on a dispatcher’s screen.
At first, two or three covered most of the greater Tel Aviv area, Israel’s largest metropolitan area, which covers about 586 square miles and is home to more than 3.9 million residents.
As the missiles approached, the ovals turned orange and then red and split into more than a dozen smaller ovals as the software narrowed down their possible paths.
A separate screen showed a map of the city and the location the system had identified as a possible fallen debris or missile impact.
The map showed ambulances already en route to the site, although the dispatcher never picked up the phone, as the information automatically passed through the dispatcher to the army and to nearby ambulances and motorcycle medics.
“In the past, if I got a call about a house burning because a missile fell, they had to call me and say, ‘Listen, there’s a fire; send your ambulance,'” Shechem said. “Now we work on the same computerised system. And once they put it in their system – a suspected missile attack caused a fire at this location in Tel Aviv – it will automatically be sent to Magen David Adom, saving time and saving any information that might get lost during translation.”
Highly sophisticated systems seem to push the boundaries of human error reduction.
Yet, at the receiving end of all that dehumanising infallibility, there are still paramedics like Itai Orion, who count themselves lucky to have yet to be called to the scene of a missile attack.
But his wife’s family lives in Beit Shemesh, where a direct attack on Sunday killed nine people hiding in a bomb shelter – the highest death toll from any attack since Iran’s retaliatory strike.
When the missiles fell, Orion said, he felt as insecure about his family’s safety as if he were a regular civilian.
“Going through that moment when you’re not sure if everybody’s OK and you have to check, but they’re not picking up because there’s no cell reception in the protected area,” he said. “It’s just an ordinary situation; undoubtedly, the Israeli experience is reflected in it.”
