By Gregory Childress

gchildress@heraldsun.com; 918-1046

Chapel Hill -- After a few false starts, three emergency call boxes installed in neighborhoods near the UNC campus are finally operational.

Town officials issued a press release this week to announce that the call boxes at 407 Merritt Mill Road, the corner of Church and Short streets and Mallette Street at Colony Court are now working.

"We encourage everybody to use them in case of an emergency," said Kumar Neppalli, a traffic engineer for the Town of Chapel Hill who has worked on the project since its inception.

The university has numerous emergency call boxes strategically located throughout the campus, but the three student-sponsored boxes are the first to be installed on town streets.

The locations for the blue, tubular call boxes were chosen with input from UNC students and officials, police and other town staff.

"Those locations were chosen based on the activity going on in those areas," Neppalli said. "They were also chosen because they are areas where there is high student traffic. That is the main reason."

The boxes are a gift from the UNC student body to improve safety and to honor the memory of Eve Carson, the former UNC student body president who was kidnapped and murdered in 2008.

Students donated $80,000 to the town to install the call boxes and improve lighting in neighborhoods around the campus. Forty thousand dollars was set aside for street-level lighting and another $40,000 was earmarked for emergency call boxes.

UNC student body president Jasmin Jones was excited to learn that the call boxes are finally operational.

"It makes the mission complete," Jones said. "I'm very happy about that."

Although the call boxes have been in place for several months, technical difficulties involving incompatible wiring have prevented them from being powered on. AT&T used wiring that was not compatible with existing wiring when they hooked up the telephones. As a result, Duke Power had to provide additional wiring for the phones to work.