PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AP) — Peterson Air Force base is getting ready for its annual holiday mission — tracking Santa’s storybook sleigh ride around the world.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been working for weeks to tackle the one-day mission.
Miles of wire, dozens of computers and 157 telephone lines will greet hundreds of volunteers Thursday, The (Colorado Springs) Gazette reported. Volunteers will be answering calls from an estimated 125,000 children around the globe looking for Santa’s whereabouts.
“We keep adding stuff every year,” said Staff Sgt. Kyle Kelly after he and a team of airmen taped down phone wires in the call center Monday.
The call center in a training building will be staffed for 23 hours and Christmas Eve. Volunteers will also share Santa’s location on Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Santa got 1.6 million Facebook likes.
“We start in November,” Kelly said. “We have to test every phone before we bring it in here.”
NORAD’s 60th year of tracking Santa involves more than the military. The program is underwritten by contractors who pay for the phones, the computers and the website.
First lady Michelle Obama is expected to volunteer, with calls forwarded to her on Christmas Eve.
Volunteers will field a growing number of calls from curious kids from outside the United States.
“We get a lot of calls from Europe, Australia and New Zealand,” said NORAD’s Stacey Knott, who has organized the Santa tracking for three years.
Bilingual volunteers handle the foreign-language inquiries.
On the bilingual front, NORAD, a partnership between the U.S. and Canada, has a distinct advantage.
“The great thing about having Canadian forces here is they can speak in French,” Canadian Maj. Jennifer Stadnyk said.
NORAD is responsible for defending the skies and monitoring the sea approaches for both nations.
Its control room was originally inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs in a shelter designed to withstand a nuclear attack. The control room is now at Peterson Air Force Base, also in Colorado Springs.
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