When it comes to getting fire or rescue vehicles to an emergency site, time is of the essence. To aid in its response times, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue (HCFR) in Florida, which serves the 1,000 square miles that surround Tampa, is looking to implement satellite technology.
HCFR equipped all 125 emergency response vehicles in its fleet with the Radio Satellite Integrators Inc.’s (RSI) Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system. The system combines GPS, wireless communications and ESRI mapping software to provide real-time and historical vehicle fleet location data to HCFR dispatchers.
“We are utilizing it to send the closest unit to an emergency call location,” HCFR Section Chief James Olsen told Satellite News.
Under the current system (the RSI AVL system is in its final stages of implementation), the computer-aided dispatch system determines the nearest available units to an emergency based on the location of the fire stations in the county.
“This AVL technology gives us real-time data on where our units are; not where their fire stations are,” Olsen said. He described a scenario in which a vehicle could be coming back from a hospital and traveling through an area that it is not generally assigned to, but it may be the closest unit to an emergency scene. “Because of the location of the call and where [the vehicle is] in relation to that call, it comes up that they are closer and the computer-aided dispatch system will suggest that the [out-of-area] unit be dispatched” rather than calling the nearest station house to dispatch services to the emergency scene.
“What it does is reduce our response times,” Olsen said. “Typically, in our urban areas, our goal is to have a unit on the scene within five minutes of the time we receive the call to the time we have a unit at that location.”
In addition to alerting dispatchers to the closest vehicles, the system includes in-vehicle laptop computers to provide more precise maps and driving directions to drivers.
The system, which has been deployed in the city of Tampa and will soon be available throughout the county, “helps to reduce the amount of radio traffic on the air,” Olsen said. “You don’t have to get on the radio and tell somebody you are responding to a call.” This is accomplished through the use of two-way data packets. When a unit responds to a call, the driver can hit a function key on the computer, which will alert the dispatch center that it is responding to the call and logs the response time. When the unit arrives, drivers can hit another key to provide dispatchers with more accurate response-time data.
One residual benefit of the system that came to light from the Tampa fire and rescue team is the AVL unit records the direction, speed and location of a moving unit once every five seconds during an emergency response and every minute during non-emergencies. “Those records have been used in court cases to determine a vehicle’s speed, direction and where its emergency lights were on,” Olsen said. “Tampa was involved in a case where the AVL proved differently to the benefit of the Tampa fire department from what the witnesses were saying on the scene,” adding an additional layer of accountability, he said.
–Gregory Twachtman
(James Olsen, HCFR, 813/272-6600)
