TEL AVIV — The main nerve center of Israel’s primary emergency service resembles any dispatch center in any American city — a beehive of uniform first-responders surrounded by an expanse of ceiling-height monitors and computers.
But Magen David Adam’s dispatch facility in Ramla, about 12 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, is more than 100 feet underground, protected by thick walls and a sophisticated breathing system capable of providing clean air in the event of conventional and unconventional attacks.
“You don’t imagine any other emergency services, civilian emergency services, working in a shelter. But for us, it’s a necessary, basic requirement,” said Uri Shacham, MDA’s deputy director and chief of staff. MDA’s role, he said. “It’s about making sure that this brain actually continues to function, no matter what’s going on outside, no matter how challenging the situation.”
When NBC News visited the facility Tuesday, the mood was busy but calm as about a dozen uniformed dispatchers handled phone calls and plotted routes for emergency vehicles on an array of screens.
Soon, the phones rang with news of incoming missiles from Iran. The alert appears to have sounded on civilian phones just as the dispatcher noticed.
Within minutes, the dispatcher’s screen showed green ovals indicating the likely destination of the missiles.
First, two or three cover most of the Tel Aviv area, Israel’s largest metropolitan area, covering about 586 square miles and home to more than 3.9 million residents.
As the missiles approached, the ovules turned orange, then red, and split into more than a dozen smaller ovals as the software narrowed down their potential paths.
A separate screen showed a map of the city and the locations the system had identified as potential fallen debris or missile impacts.
The map showed ambulances already en route to the site, yet the dispatcher never picked up the phone because the information traveled automatically from the military through the dispatcher and on to nearby ambulances and motorcycle medics.
“In the past, if I received a call about a house on fire from a missile fall, they would call me and say, ‘There’s a fire, send your ambulance,'” Shachem said. “Now we work on the same computerized system. And once they put it in their system — a fire in Tel Aviv at this location due to a suspected missile hit — it’s automatically sent to Magen David Adam, saving time, saving any information that’s lost during translation.”
A more sophisticated system stretches the limits of how much human error can be reduced.
Yet, at the sharp end of all that inhuman infallibility, there are still paramedics like Itai Orion, who consider themselves lucky not to have been called to the scene of a missile strike yet.
But his wife’s family lives in Beit Shemesh, where a direct hit Sunday killed nine people in a bomb shelter — the largest single death toll in any strike since Iran’s counteroffensive began.
When the missiles hit, Orion said, he feels as vulnerable about his family’s safety as an ordinary citizen.
“Having to go through that, you know, at that moment you’re like, ‘Is everybody OK and you have to check in and they’re not picking up because there’s no cell reception in a protected space,'” he said. “That’s just, you know, run of the mill, par for the course, Israeli experience right there.”
