Quote:Its honestly absurd in this day and age that the possibility of people still receiving 911 calls at thier homes, amd the lack of some type of organize dispatching center for a single county, what a royal mess im glad you guys find a way to make it work but what if something happens on a county wide scale i.e. natural disaster massive structural fire, how do these so called dispatch centers cooperate?Once we get to an incident of any sizable nature, we go to a MABAS alarm, which then is handled by our MABAS Division's dispatch center, which is Rockford Fire. We all have our pre-planned and packaged run cards, so the minute I go beyond auto aid companies virtually everything gets handled by the MABAS folks, who are good at what they do. MABAS is pretty cool, if you haven't heard of it do a search. I'll have three radios at the command post, one on our MABAS (IFERN) channel to hear incoming units, a fireground channel, and then I'll monitor our channel in case someone is on it by accident, or I need to call our dispatch to get utilities or something to the scene that I don't need to tying up MABAS dispatchers with.
This is Illinois. There's a lot of things wrong. Non centralized dispatch is just one of them. Keep in mind the department that is dispatched out of homes is probably a 150 call a year department, if that. Trying to keep track of who dispatches who in the Chiacgo suburbs is also interesting.
Our ambulance at my fire department is hospital owned, but staffs a rig in my station. In exchange for us getting an ALS ambo and their dispatch center, they get free living quarters and a bay to use, plus bill our "customers" for transports. Our dispatchers are all trained by an outside agency, they're for the most part competent. Turnover and having new people is the biggest issue. I'm working on a tax referendum (hopefully) to create a taxing district for a fire department owned ambo. There's a ton of other issues and details to explain better that I could get into, but this post would become huge.
911 calls for the entire county are handled by one of two centers, city and county. Obviously they get each others calls and will transfer, and both offer redundancy for each other in case of a storm or other disaster. The 911 calls are then handed off to each agency, or across the floor in the dispatch center (i.e. Rockford 911 answers and gets a Rockford Fire call). Probably could be more efficient, I'm sure.
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