New GPS units help us find you.

For years when firefighters would visit with school aged children we would talk about calling 9-1-1 and how the children needed to know their address when they called. As times changed and technology progressed, if you called 9-1-1 from a phone connected directly to a wall jack, our enhanced computer aided dispatch system could tell where you were calling from based on the phone you were using. This greatly improved our ability to respond timely when we could not get the caller to tell us where they were because the computer would tell us exactly where the phone was located.

In the 1990's with cell phones becoming more prevalent this became much more difficult. People would call and were not sure of their address, dispatchers had to use landmarks to help the caller identify where they were close enough to be able to give us accurate information which took valuable time away from our response. In recent years the cell phone and dispatch technology has evolved so much that now our dispatchers can sometimes locate your place on earth by your cell phone signal. At our dispatch center in Tanasbourne a dispatcher could use their computer to determine the latitude and longitude of the callers location based on their cell phone signal. As people abandoned their traditional land line home phones for cell phones this became all the more important of a tool to be able to use.

Last week we installed Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) units in our Engine 421 and Rescue 4 that enable us to use this cell phone location information on our end and direct our crews right to the scene. This is so vitally important when you consider how much of our 85 square miles of response area is really rural. It could be a farmer in the middle of a field in Verboort having chest pains while moving his irrigation, a mountain bike rider who has crashed on one of the local trails, or a child calling for their sick mother from a home in the city, but we hope that these new GPS units will help us respond quicker when seconds really do count.

These small GPS units in our engine and rescue can have a big impact on our ability to respond to an incident quickly when the caller isn't sure of their location.

In addition to the ability that these units provide us to find people they also help others find us. We use air ambulance resources like Lifeflight quite often and with our GPS units we can tell the pilots exactly where the landing zone is located. Don't worry however, we aren't abandoning the more traditional methods like paper maps that are still carried on our engines, and our firefighters will still train on basic road and area familiarization, but these electronic tools are just one of the many ways that we are looking towards technology to become more efficient improve our service to the community.