Dispatch Protocol

[WebBoss]

voyager9 said:

I like the idea of stations being announced by geographic proximity. We do that now for our grids and it makes an automatic reduced-speed policy much easier.

This I agree with 100%.

There is currently no Rhyme or reason as to how companies are dispatched now once you get past the "Home-Town" stations. For the grids that are more resource based versus station based, I would like to see it go one step further by announcing the engines first by geographic proximity, followed by the ladders by geographic proximity, the rescues by proximity, lastly being special units and EMS.

I frequently call this order of "Due", which I guess in a pefect world those who are closer geographically should be "Due" sooner, but we know how all the variables keep that from happening consistently.

This is actually something that can be easily accomplished by a fire chief during the grid-rewrite process. If the chief really wants to stand firm to central and have his responses announced by proximity and resource type, then I expect that it would happen.

[FirstDue312]

rp42 said:

I much rather here the stations repeated than the time out

Gotta agree with RP42. For people that don't have a repeater and wake up in the middle of the night and catch the end of the tones dropping and miss the station dispatch, its confusing since we have a lot of different resources going to other towns, and waiting til 2nd tap isnt exactly good for response times. I don't think repeating the stations again really would be a problem. As for geographic proximity, it makes sense if the Chief's want to arrange their grids like that. And as for time out at the end, once again, I don't think it would hurt. The more basic information we can glean from a dispatch, the better informed we as firefighters, officers, whatever, are about the incident to which we're responding, which is never a bad thing.

[division2]

At the last radio policy committee meeting, we did identify and agree that based upon feedback from the street, Central will in the not to distant future start announcing the stations a second time. There are departments that are using a TF tone such as voyager mentioned. We are also looking for the town, and or subdivision to be announced on the repeat as well.

As far as the time, we talked about it initially and in review, not enough need identified.

Cheese, you mention everyone using the same map book, what a concept, we talked about that over two years ago at the original meetings. It was so long ago that I don't remember why we couldn't do it. I have had a conversation or two with some GIS people and we may have another option. When I get some good answers I'll share more.

For all, if you have ideas, suggestions, bitches etc about the radio policy, we need to know about them. Send Pat or I an email and we will take it to committee.

Steve

[thelurker]

thank you steve, although I know a lot of what we talk about has already been discussed at the county level, it is good to see that our feedback can make a difference in some things.