VIDEO: Coordinating wildfire resources is no easy task, but dispatchers at the Northeast Washington Interagency Communications Center (NEWICC) in Colville have it down to a science.
"There's a lot of moving parts, and we're a part of that team," said Jill Jones, who has managed NEWICC since 2015. "It's really rewarding."
NEWICC is a partnership between several state and federal agencies–including the Washington Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and more–that started in 2008 and covers 10 northeast Washington counties. “The beauty of this is that we're all in this one facility and work together seamlessly," Jones said.
NEWICC is one of nine dispatch centers across the state of Washington, four of which are interagency cooperations.