Orange County’s (CA) Fire and Rescue team is getting high-tech assistance. A new station alert system has only been online for a few months but already first responders say it is getting results.
Think Google maps with station-specific rescue alerts delivered on everything from first responders’ smart phones to fire-rescue mobile data computers and you have Orange County Fire’s new station alerting system.
“If 10 calls come in, we can distribute all 10 at the same time,” Chief Otto Drozd told WKMG-TV News 6. Drozd is behind the county’s high-tech response revolution just introduced this past May. “Today we are much more efficient than we were just a few months ago,” Drozd said.
Orange County Fire and Rescue averages 119,000 emergency calls every year, and Drozd and his team tell News 6 efficiency and speed is the number one priority. “There is no doubt I know where the call is going when I get the proper address,” said Lt. Robert Izzo who has served with Orange County Fire Rescue for 19 years. “We can actually get a pre-alert on the system so we know even before we walk out the door to the truck where we are going.”
The county’s fire-rescue teams will be integrating faster arrival times with drones and thermal imaging, combining Intel from coal to rescue. “This is really melding all those data bases we have with modern technology in order to get the information to the people who need it in the most timely fashion.” Drozd said.
Preliminary data for the station alert system shows that response times are cut as much as a minute per incident.
Orange County Fire Rescue is one of the first departments to use the technology but more than 385 cities worldwide use similar technologies serving roughly 24 million people.
For more information, visit www.stationalerting.com.