Though Payne Springs (Texas) Fire Rescue is located just 65 miles southeast of Dallas, it is a rural department. Nevertheless, it really has stepped up from a technology standpoint. As a volunteer department, it needed to be more efficient, so in 2005 it purchased online Web-based fire and EMS records-management system from Emergency Reporting, which has helped the department both internally and externally.

The department, which was formed in 1974, today covers the city of Payne Springs in addition to several premier communities and 99% of Henderson County Emergency Service District No. 2. It services 36 square miles of lake resort community, which has everything from single-wide mobile homes to a 55,000-square-foot house. The department has 54 volunteers who respond out of two stations, and currently is building a 16,800-square-foot facility that will serve as its main station. The current main station then will be converted into a substation.

Payne Springs had an ISO rating of 6/9 until the department purchased twin E-One vacuum tankers, which assisted in lowering the rating to a PPC of 4 across its district. The tankers are used for water supply because the resort area that the department covers utilizes dry hydrants. In addition, the department has 13 apparatus, including an aerial platform truck and three engines, as well as rescue and brush trucks. Though we are first responders, we do not run EMS transport calls.

The department started using the records-management system to do its incident reporting, which in turn reports to the Texas Fire Incident Reporting System (TEXFIRS) and National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS). We also use the platform’s message center, maintenance program, and inventory and administration tools; however, because the department conducts its training through the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals Association of Texas program, it doesn’t use the platform’s training module.

The RMS has been a blessing since day one. Before we went to a computerized system, we manually collected data, a process that wasn’t as accurate as what we have now. Also, while we used to send handwritten reports to TEXFIRS, we never submitted to NFIRS before installing this system.

Transparency is Key

Being a volunteer department, it’s very important for us to show people what we do, so during the first budgetary year after we started using the system, we generated several different types of reports, e.g., personnel hours on scene and call types and locations. We even broke our district down geographically and measured response times to each sector. Providing accurate information to our emergency service district has proved valuable over the years.

Frequently, people pass by a volunteer fire department, see the doors shut and think it never does anything. But our department is one of the busiest in Henderson County, handling about 1,000 calls a year — for a rural volunteer department, that’s quite a lot. The RMS enables us to tell our community exactly what we do, how and where we do it, and how many man hours that they are getting for free. With the click of a button, this system also lets me determine what it would have cost the community if it had to pay for career firefighters. So far this year, we have given the community more than $300,000 worth of donated time.

Everyone in the department uses the system. We have volunteers from all walks of life, but this program is so simple that even my least computer literate firefighter can see the reports and move the incident to map it in the right position. We’ve had zero problems with people entering the incidents immediately because now there’s an Internet-connected computer at the stations. I also have a computer in my command vehicle and am planning to put one in each engine so that staff can enter information while on scene.

The program also allows us to upload pictures, which would help in the event one of our staff was called to testify regarding a building fire that occurred well in the past. If we did what we were supposed to do and took pictures, the report would include all of the images taken at that fire, which would help to refresh memories. For a volunteer department, because we’re not in the station every day, it is an advantage to have a system that is easy to use yet captures comprehensive information.

One of the system’s newest features is Google Maps integration, which we quickly put to use. One of our more prominent gated communities — the smallest house is probably 3,000 square feet — is a major supporter of our fire department. The community has a many lakefront properties and quite a few dry hydrants to which we hook-up with our vacuum tankers. Some of these hydrants were damaged because lake levels were very low due to the major drought that the area experienced. As a result, the community planned to spend $60,000 to $70,000 to buy more dry hydrants and invited me to meet with them.

After meeting with the community, I wondered whether Google Maps would allow me to map all the hydrants in the area in order to develop a plan that would benefit this effort. After consulting with the vendor, I not only was able to plot every hydrant in our fire district, but I was able to color-code them based on flow, as identified by NFPA regulations. The system even identifies hydrants that are out of service and those to which we can connect our vacuum tankers, known as draft access points.

I printed out this map and brought it to the next community meeting — they were blown away that we could provide that kind of data. More important, we convinced them to buy more flexible hard suction for our tankers so that we can extend out in the lake, rather than additional dry hydrants, at a savings of $40,000.

The mapping functionality has other uses. We believe that annual reports are important for our community and we use the RMS to generate them. The mapping feature provides a strong visual tool to identify incidents that occurred over the previous year and prove that the incidents were evenly distributed across our district.

We experience some pretty major grass fires in the state of Texas, and we’ve used the mapping program to help manage such fires. The system provides a satellite view that allows us to determine what the fire is moving toward. This feature also helps with vehicle placement on city streets. It’s not perfect, because some of the satellite images can be pretty dated, but even though we’ve only had Google Maps for three months, it’s been a major plus.

Human Interests

On a more personal note, each year we have an awards banquet to say thank you to our firefighters. Using the RMS, we created a program that breaks down fire calls and EMS calls and provides total responses for each member in those two categories, and we award trophies for the top ten responders in each category. The system can do in seconds what it used to take me hours to do.

Another new technology that we recently deployed is an emergency dispatch notification system from
e-Dispatches that sends emergency voice and text pages to department members’ cell phones. Our area has a lot of rolling hills and plenty of trees, which often makes radio dispatch difficult. The ability to send such alerts via the e-Dispatch system has boosted the department’s response by as much as 18% — what this means for a volunteer department is that we get five to seven more people simply because they can pick up on the call. Firefighters push one button and immediately hear the page.

In addition, this platform enabled us to integrate our radio system with our website, so anyone can go to www.psfirerescue.com, click on “listen now” and hear the department’s or county’s dispatch channel.

Over the last couple months, we’ve discovered that technology really is a game changer. And if a small rural department like ours can take advantage of it, so can yours. — As told to Janet Wilmoth

Randy Harley is chief of Payne Springs (Texas) Fire Rescue. He has been in the fire service since 1983 and currently works full-time as a safety and environmental director.