911:: re: Pagers

[Guest guest]

>To: " '911console ' " <911console >

>

>Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 02:24:46 -0700

>Reply-To: 911console

>Subject: 911:: re: Pagers

>

> As a volunteer firefighter and a dispatcher I can see a few problems

>with alphanumeric pagers. First would not be woken up by a alphanumeric

>pager beepeing at me or even vibrating its way across my headboard. I need

>to have the loud motorola tones coming across to even get my

Coming from a family that has been involved with our all volunteer fire

department for almost 90 years, and in a town that added minitors to its

Gamewell horns and Federal siren system as a method of dispatch back in 1980

then abolished the whistles in 1998, I can only say this: there's nothing as

effective as using both. We got the pagers because there were times when

certain whistles didn't work and because a lot of members couldn't always hear

them while inside stores or even in their cars. For many decades prior to the

arrival of radio paging, there would always be parking problems at the

firehouses and at the scene from such big turnouts. We almost always had all of

our trucks arriving at the scene within 5 minutes in our less than 2 square mile

area. When the pagers arrived, we noticed a steady reduction in response. After

the whistles were abolished, our turnout has decreased to a danger level. Last

night I made a truck responding from 2 towns away at 19:30 hou!

rs, something that never used to happen if I was only a mile away in my own

town.

More than one of fire department in NJ that turned off their whistles has

re-activated them for this reason. I wish it would happen in my town soon.

From the 1920's until the late 1950's, we used a steam whistle for fire

alerting with several 2 1/2 hp Federal sirens as back up. The source of steam

was a boilerhouse for two large rubber factories; in fact, the boilers were at

the site of North America's largest fire loss of 1957. The whistle itself was

the type used on trasns-Atlantic steamers that could be heard for 100 miles on

the open water and in our hilly part of New Jersey it could always be heard for

at least 10 miles.

Rich Dean, NJ USA .. secondary email addresses are rldean@...,

deanr@... .. HS Class of 1970, Vol Firefighter since 1973,

Telecommunciator/Dispatch since 1975, Railfan since birth in 1952.. Founder of

Egroups.com groups for NJArea, Fire-Police, NJ_Area_Railpics,

NorthAmericanParades and NorthJerseyVolFire.. Member of many more online groups

such as nysw@..., nyswegroups, tiersightings@egroups,

Fire-L@topica, Firepics@egroups, 911dispatcher@egroups

------------------------------------------------------------

--== Sent via Deja.com ==--

http://www.deja.com/