Md. responders to receive alerts by single cellular system

November 02, 2009 03:38 AM

By Kevin Spradlin
The Cumberland Times News

CUMBERLAND, Md. — Allegany County volunteer firefighters and emergency medical personnel might be carrying a little less weight these days. And it’s not because they’re on a new diet.

Instead, a new system has allowed most volunteers to receive alerts by a single cellular system instead of carrying a cell phone, a pager and a portable scanner. The alert system was implemented by Dick DeVore, chief of the county Emergency Management Division in the Allegany County Department of Public Safety and Homeland Security, and Mike Powell, midnight shift supervisor of the Joint Communications Center.

It has been in place countywide for about six weeks. The technology was tested on a smaller incident management group in the six weeks prior to that. So far, so good, DeVore said.

“It’s going very, very well,” DeVore said. “We’re getting very positive feedback from it. It’s just one more means we have of trying to get a message out.”

The system allows an emergency dispatcher’s computer-aided dispatching software to collect the address and nature of a call for service. Then the system “tells us who to send” the message to, DeVore said. “With the click of a button, that e-mail is off. In some cases, that text message is hitting cellular phones before we’re getting the house sirens activated.”

The message can be sent to volunteers’ e-mail inbox or they can receive it as a text message on a cellular device. Working with TWRâ€ˆCommunications in Cumberland, volunteers also can receive alphanumeric text messages on a pager device. Time is of the essence when responding to an emergency. While the tool has not yet shown to improve response times, it does “provide a better saturation” to spread the message of an emergency.

Individual fire and rescue companies are able to manage who signs on to receive the messages, DeVore said. It’s not possible to know exactly how many people are on the system. The advantage, however, is that it’s less time-consuming for county staff to manage.

DeVore said he is working with local media outlets, including the Times-News, to explore the possibility of allowing them to receive certain messages. The working relationship could be a time-saver for both sides, he said, as emergency officials wouldn’t have to immediately answer a reporter’s phone call and a reporter already would know the location and severity of the emergency.

Having such a system open to the public, however, is not likely. At least not yet.

“Iwouldn’t rule out, at some point, (of) potentially exploring the option of allowing residents to sign up for text messaging alerts” for weather conditions or other general but important information, DeVore said.

911 and Dispatch