Beginning Wednesday “unfamiliar cars” will be lurking in every corner of Iberia Parish with anything but ill intent, parish officials said.

The parish 911 Communications District has commissioned St. Cloud, Minn.-based GeoComm to collect GPS coordinates for all roads and habitable structures in Iberia Parish, said Prescott Marshall, Iberia Parish Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness director.

“The bottom line is that our 911 system map is used to make life or death decisions and that’s not being dramatic,” Marshall said adding that in the age of cell phones and the abandonment of land lines, 911 districts all over the country have had to change how they operate to increase and ensure public safety.

GeoComm vehicles are white Toyota Rav 4s and white Chevy Equinoxes, Marshall said. All the vehicles used in the data collection will be marked with the company’s logo and with a sign that they are conducting “official 911 business.” GeoComm workers also will be able to produce identification badges, Marshall said.

The district will spend $190,000 on the project, officials said, which covers the field work and “public safety-oriented refinement of the collected information.”

It is imperative to have accurate, thorough maps, Marshall explained, noting it is unclear if maps produced for example by Google are accurate to the communications district’s standards, necessitating the expense. Marshall said it is east to find locations where information already available by these data systems is “significantly inaccurate” in Iberia Parish.

GeoComm also will include in the project, an electronic GPS map of the parish based on Emergency Service Zones, Marshall said, that dispatchers in the 911 center use.

“This means that cell phone calls will be automatically linked to the correct response agency, for instance the New Iberia Fire Department vs. Iberia Parish Fire District No. 1,” Marshall said. “We have this now for land line calls, but not for cell phone calls.”

The “unfamiliar cars” are expected to drive every road in the parish collecting this data this month and next. For more information, or to ask any questions, residents can call GeoComm at (888) 436-2666 asking for the Iberia Parish Project team or Marshall at the 911 office at 369-4427.