During its last council meeting, the City of Morden approved the installation of an emergency communications tower. This tower will be erected at the Civic Centre and will improve communication when it's needed most.

"If we have a tower it'll just enhance the ability for all of these organizations to communicate," said Mayor Ken Wiebe.

Wiebe said a community can never have too much communication, adding this is a step towards improving residents' safety.

Southern Emergency Response Committee's (SERC) Emergency Coordinator Chris Kalansky said after doing a number of training exercises, a challenge they'd faced is having a strong communications network.

"In the end, we can provide a quicker and better response to a large-scale disaster," said Kalansky.

In previous exercises, Kalansky said they used a portable tower, which comes with a pretty lengthy setup time. He added with this new permanent tower they'll be able to reduce their response time from roughly an hour and a half to a two-minute process.

A pair of grants has helped with covering the cost of the tower. Kalansky said Enbridge was able to provide them with a $10,000 grant, which will cover around half of the cost of the tower. Another expense for the tower is the equipment to go along with it, which Trans Canada Pipeline awarded a $10,000 grant to cover.

Wiebe said there is no specified timeline to have everything complete, but everyone is working diligently to get it done as fast as they can.