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Comment by Dustin J. Millis on February 6, 2009 at 3:32am

My dept. just added that "feature" to our paging system. I'm calling it a feature because I dont know what else to call it LOL. Let me give you the rundown real quick... Our officers carry pagers and portables, our FF's carry pagers. Dispatch has a main tower about 20 miles away that hits a repeater that sends us the call. There is a backup tower that can hit a backup repeater incase the original goes down. Sounds pretty foolproof right??? Yeah it does, however; just about three weeks ago there was an EMS call in my district. The "ambulance shack" right down the road from us was the only crew originally paged out because the call came in as just a elderly female feeling weak. The crew arrived on scene and found a pt. unconcious and not breathing. They immeaditly called for an assist from us. Problem is county tried to dispatch my dept. four times and the tones did not drop a single time. Long story short... we end up on scene 45 minutes after the medics originally asked for us because thats how long it took to get the page so we didnt even know about it. I guess what happened is that both towers went down and the entire county was not getting pages. Yikes!!!!

Because of that we implemenet the "Alpha Numeric" system. I dont know why its called that but thats what I was told to call it LOL. And its real simple... in addition to our pagers going off, certain members of our dept. (all the officers and most of the FF's) recieve a txt message giving the location and nature of the call. County still dispatches the way they used to and just know also sends us the txt. So far we havnt had any problems with it. If an update comes in while we are enroute, that also comes via txt. It works out real nice because if we are having a hard time hearing the radio, you can just read the info. If you forget the address numerics, you have them right there in your hand. The only problems I can foresee are things like the dispatcher saying one address and txting another but that can be verified fairly easily. We put in a policy that if that ever happens we go to the address that was said over the radio rather then in txt and we also verify it right away. Other then that, it works real good

Comment by lutan1 on February 6, 2009 at 1:35am

During the London bombings, the first communicaiton channel to fall over from overload was cell phones.

The same often occurs here in Oz everytime there's a major wildfire.

What protection is in palce for your system? What contingencies and back ups are there?

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