The Wood County Resiliency Center was a four-year project that cost over $13 million from money supplied to the community through the American Recovery Act to meet needs the county encountered during the COVID pandemic. The center includes a large meeting/ballroom, three smaller breakout meeting rooms, a kitchen, holding cells for socially distant trials with a secure sally port to bring people in, a room that will house the backup 911 center, a garage area where the county maintenance department will be and more. (Photo by Brett Dunlap)

PARKERSBURG — The face of the county is changing as Wood County opened a new 911 Center, had construction finished on the new Wood County Resiliency Center and is facilitating a move for the Mid-Ohio Valley Regional Health Department.

Over the past year, work was finished on converting the former Suddenlink Call Center near the intersection of Interstate 77 and U.S. 50 into the new Wood County 911 Center, construction was finished on the Wood County Resiliency Center on the site of the old county jail in downtown Parkersburg and the move is being made to relocate the health department from Sixth Street to St. Joseph’s Landing.

The new Wood County 911 Center went online in August after over a year of renovation work to the former call center, Wood County 911 Director Mike Shook said.

“Everyone is settled into their stations and everything is working pretty good,” he said. “We are doing those things that you do when you haven’t any kind of construction and taking care of the little things that pop up and take care of them as they show their heads.

“We are plugging right along.”

The Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department is in the process of moving from its previous location on Sixth Street to St. Joseph’s Landing (the former St. Joseph’s Hospital). Officials expect to be completely moved in by sometime this summer. (Photo Provided)

The renovation work created an 18,000-square-foot facility which includes various offices, a training area, the emergency operations center, the dispatching room, the server room, a storage area and more.

The dispatch room operates 10 computer-assisted dispatch stations with four to five manned at any given time depending on staffing needs. There is room to install more if needed in the future.

The county is retaining the former 911 Center on Core Road to be used as an immediate backup center, if needed. Shook said parts of the old center were being converted to create fitness workout space for deputies as well as different sheriff’s department vehicles will also be kept there.

County officials said the new center was designed with the idea that if the state would go to regional 911 dispatching with multiple counties being handled by a single center, the Wood County 911 Center would be ready to accommodate that.

“That was the whole idea behind it,” Shook said.

The Wood County Resiliency Center had its grand opening on Feb. 4 with a ribbon cutting and open house.

The center was a four-year project that cost over $13 million from money supplied to the community through the American Recovery Act to meet needs the county encountered during the COVID pandemic, including conducting social distancing trials, having a drive-through distribution system and more.

“We spent a year planning this building with a year’s worth of meetings, very public, to make sure this building could do a lot,” Wood County Commission President Blair Couch said.

The center includes a large meeting/ballroom, three smaller breakout meeting rooms, a kitchen, holding cells for trials with a secure sally port to bring people in, a room that will house the backup 911 center, a garage area where the county maintenance department will be and more.

The center can be reserved for large scale meetings with breakout rooms that could accommodate smaller groups as well as other events.

The WVU Medicine Camden Clark Foundation recently held the annual Heart Ball at the center.

Architect Adam Krason of ZMM Architects & Engineers of Charleston, who led the design work and oversaw the construction of the building, talked about the process that went into designing the building.

“The biggest challenge we were asked to address was to provide an extremely high level of flexibility,” Krason said. “The goal was to design a building that functions daily as a facility that can serve the citizens of Wood County by providing much needed meeting space while also being able to respond to future adverse events.”

The health department offices were closed after Memorial Day 2024 when a break in a water line caused a lot of damage to the building at 211 Sixth St. in Parkersburg.

The county commission spent the summer looking at other locations where the health department could relocate and finally approved a lease at St. Joseph’s Landing at the end of August. The county is leasing around 32,400 square feet at the facility.

As for the building on Sixth Street, Couch said the building will likely be torn down sometime in the near future.

“Over time it has really deteriorated,” he said. “It is not a safe building.”

Couch said the health department is about 80% moved in at St. Joseph’s Landing.

Malcolm Lanham, Community Health and Threat Preparedness Director for the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, said they are hoping to be completely moved in sometime in the early summer.

The Women, Infants and Children Program moved over to St. Joseph’s last October. Many items in storage were moved in November. The first phase of clinical services opened up in the former St. Joseph’s Emergency Department on Jan. 1 to see clients and patients.

The finance department is planning to be moved into the fourth floor of the building by mid-February, he said. Their internet network is expected to be in place by the end of February/early March as many of their people are currently working off of internet hot spots. The clinic area will have some more work done with Lanham estimating it to be done by mid-March or so.

Environmental Health, Community Health, the Threat Preparedness Team and administrative services are looking to move in soon as personnel are still working from their homes and vehicles.

“We are all anxious to get moved in and get back to some normalcy here in the near future,” Lanham said.

Brett Dunlap can be reached at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com