ROCKLEDGE, Fla. — Brevard's Emergency Operations Center is the busiest in the state due to activations during rocket launches and storms.

• Brevard Emergency Operations Center is busiest of its kind in Florida
• Workers fielded 12,000 calls to its hotline during Hurricane Irma
• Site being prepared behind existing building for bigger facility

But the 50-year-old building is outdated and isn't suitable for the work being done there during a crisis.

Now, there's light at the end of the tunnel: Site work is underway for a new 43,000-square-foot EOC, to be built on a large lot behind the current one.

"It will be bigger, better, more resilient," Emergency Management Director Kimberly Prosser said Wednesday. 

Nonprofit 211 Brevard is among the agencies on lockdown at the Rockledge EOC during hurricanes.

"We take six, seven people in for the lockdown and stay as long as we have to," Belinda Stewart of 211 Brevard said. "We take basically all of their calls from the public, talking to people who are frightened. Our call volume is sky high during those kinds of events."

During Hurricane Irma in 2017, Stewart says her group fielded 12,000 Community Information Hotline calls in 36 hours, with her team working around the clock in cramped quarters.

"(They were) sleeping under a desk where a person is still taking a call," she says of the conditions at the time.

"When we are seeing challenges in our own building, it's our job to protect the public during cases of disaster," Prosser said. "We have been working on getting a new EOC for decades."

Officials still need a $12.8 million disaster recovery grant to come through for building construction, but they're optimistic it will come from a billion dollars of Housing and Urban Development money distributed to the state of Florida.