KANSAS CITY, Kan. — As severe weather season rolls in, the Verizon Wireless Mobile Switching Center or “The Switch” is working to ensure your cell phone still works in an emergency.
The high-tech building is meant to sustain everything from tornadoes and earthquakes to fire and flooding.
Due to security reasons FOX 4 can’t reveal where the Mobile Switching Center is located, but we can say that it’s here in the metro on the Kansas side and switches and routes millions of calls a day.
The facility was built to withstand 120 mile per hour winds, tornadoes, earthquakes, fire and flooding. It serves not only the Kansas City metro, but Topeka and Lawrence.
It was built to guarantee that in the case of severe weather you’ll still be able to make calls and get on the internet. Mike Burke with Verizon Wireless said even if its systems fail, it has plenty of backups in place.
“So this is the nerve center of the Kansas City metropolitan area,” said Burke. “This facility really has as much redundancy and protection from the weather and elements as we could possibly build in.”
The building is 26,000 square feet and has duel generator backups and ports to refuel the generators. And, that’s not all. “We also have a fleet of what we affectionately called barnyard animals that we can deploy on a moments notice to restore coverage in a community to our customers in the event of a cell site outage as an example,” said Burke.
