When I was a very young girl — don’t try to figure how long ago that was — I use to sit on the floor of my grandmother’s apartment listening to Chicago fire alarms from a very large radio with fuzzy speakers. Grandma’s cousin was Chief Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, so she knew the code words for the alarm types. She said the fire department used codes so nosey people wouldn’t show up at fires and get in the way.
I remembered Grandma when I got my first three-channel scanner and the long list of “10” codes from my father. When I learned the code numbers and meanings, I felt like part of a secret society. Eventually, codes became phased out thanks to the National Incident Management System’s requirement for plain talk.
And now, the listening public doesn’t have to sit by a radio or TV to hear alarm calls. Northern California’s San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District — a 70-square mile area encompassing four communities — offers an iPhone application that will send active 911-incident updates from dispatch, including type of response, street location, and on-scene and en-route apparatus. The app is available from the Apple Store.
Chief Richard Price believes the application will provide the district with a powerful new means of communicating with the mobile population during a disaster. Seven hundred members of the district’s Community Emergency Response Team also communicate via the app.
“We do pay quite a bit of attention to HIPPA and we don’t provide any information that’s not already public record,” Price said. “We provide the same information [on the app] that anybody can request, and even less than if you were listening to a scanner.”
A 2-minute video on the department's Web site explains the district’s iPhone app. Under the Notification setting, users can click the type of incidents they would like alerts: structure fire, vehicle accidents, CERT, news and more. There also is a gallery of incident photos to peruse and zoom in on for a closer look.
Price admitted the alerts have shown a slight increase in crowds on scenes, but others in the community use the information to avoid an area of an incident. One school-board member told Price he received an alert and showed up before the fire-department crew. San Ramon Valley police officers are on a different radio frequency, so they have downloaded the fire district’s app because it’s frequently quicker than their dispatch.
In addition to the iPhone app, the fire district’s Web site still offers online streaming radio, live incident dispatch, a choice of live cameras on scene, and Twitter updates.
Do services like these disperse educational information or do they encourage more nosey people at incidents? Will your department app in? Tell us in the comment box below.
