911:: Re: DC Fire Dispatch(ers) Problems

[Guest guest]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001 at 23:03:47,

Harry Marnell " wrote:

>

> What on earth is wrong with the DISPATCHERS??? Are they

> unable to spot unit-assignment errors and correct them? Are

> they not allowed to override the computer's unit recommendations?

> Don't they know the city? How did they ever manage BEFORE the

> CAD system came along?

I'm sure they have a manual backup system they go to but it has been

a very l-o-n-g time since DC dispatchers had to work without a CAD.

We're talking around 1972 or so.

I doubt there are many around who had to work manual. I think, however,

the issues are more profound than that and more correctly involve the

complexity of each dispatch, the number of assignments being run at any

given time, and the ultimate purpose of the CAD system itself.

It's a busy center. I don't have stats off the top of my head, but I do know

that DC Fire year-in and year-out has the busiest Engine Company in the

country. E-10 ran over 6600 assignments in the last fiscal year. One

station, E-15, ran over 18,000 calls during that same fiscal year. The

department runs the 10th busiest heavy rescue squad in the country. I

used to listen to these dispatchers and if I went more than 5 minutes

without hearing a call toned out, I was checking my scanner to see if it

had stopped working.

There is also the complexity of the assignments. We are not talking

about toning out a single station here. A house fire assignment would

be dispatched as a box alarm and would get 4 engine companies, 2 truck

companies, a rescue squad, an ALS medic unit, and a battalion chief.

And this would not in all likelihood be the only box alarm working at the

time. That's a fairly complex assignment to work out in your head and

to immediately recognize all but the most apparent and egregious of CAD

recommendation errors.

That's why the CAD is there to start with. A CAD system doesn't do a thing

that a reasonably competent dispatcher cannot do on his/her own, it just

does it faster. To take the time to manually figure out these box assignments

with all the other calls also taking place would slow up response. The issue

here isn't the dispatchers but the CAD system. If it is only 90% reliables

then I would suspect that the dispatchers are catching most of the system's

errors.

I can only speak of my own personal experience here in dealing with a CAD

database that was full of errors o at another center where I used to work.

Occasionally, a bad assignment got passed us and we toned out a wrong

station but most of the time, the dispatchers caught the error and figured

out the appropriate assignment. Of course, no one ever got commended

for doing so regularly nor even did anyone in management seem to notice.

The only time we got noticed was the handful of times that we did not catch

the error and toned out the wrong apparatus.

I, personally, would be looking at the CAD system and figuring out why it has

the failure rate that it reportedly has.

-jackie

Jackie McElroy

y Creek Fire Dept.

Walt Disney World, Florida

(I speak for me and only me.)

http://www.reedycreekdispatch.webservepro.com

http://sites.netscape.net/mcjackietron/

mailto:mcjackietron@...