By Cindy Swirko
The Gainesville Sun
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — In this age of Siri, Alexa and other disembodied voices, the unreal telecommunicator from the Alachua County Combined Communications Center dispatching fire calls should not in the least be disconcerting - but to hear it over a police scanner was a bit jarring.
The voice belongs to a new automated dispatching system that will be used by Gainesville Fire Rescue. The program, ideally, will more quickly alert the department of a fire, the type of fire, its location and the type of response that is needed, said GFR’s Michael Cowart.
Now, the dispatcher takes a call, checks the crews and vehicles that are available to respond and pages each unit individually. The new paging system will streamline that.
“On a fire call, where you might have as many as seven or eight units, you are looking at 30 seconds to a minute that this will save on the paging,” Cowart said. “It will try to minimize the amount of time it takes to process the call. It’s a matter of always trying to continually improve. It’s just always trying to stay ahead of the game and to be better.”
The system was being installed and tested this week, resulting in some strange scanner chatter that makes listeners perk up: anti-aircraft fire, a lightning strike at the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office and missives about frozen yogurt and Dumpster fires.
Cowart said the system is set to go live in mid-February, adding that no jobs will be lost as a result.
Sheriff’s spokesman Art Forgey said training for the program starts next week.
Included in the program is a matrix that will determine the response to each call based on its circumstances. A house fire, for instance, would generate a different response from an apartment complex fire.
“Those (responses) are built in automatically. When they type the fire call in, this automatic paging system will page them out,” Forgey said. “Once they are paged, that’s all it will do. It’s all human dispatch after that. All the information that’s gathered - if there is anyone in the structure, any pets - that will still be voiced by dispatchers.”
The system, from Purvis Public Safety, costs about $500,000 and will replace older, outdated equipment, Cowart said.
GFR has gradually been saving money in its capital improvement fund for several years for the upgrades. The new technology will be both at the stations and in the communications center’s computer-aided dispatching system.
“By all means, the equipment we have at the station right now breaks down. It’s old,” Cowart said. “Part of the whole project is to enhance the level of service.”
Copyright 2017 The Gainesville Sun