Hartford Fire Chief Calls for Improved Emergency Response System

VPR/Charlotte Albright

Hartford dispatcher Scott Smith handles 911 calls at the fire station.

(Host) For months, Hartford's fire chief has been pushing hard for improvements that he says would make responses to 911 calls faster.

He says as the statewide 911 system has become more high-tech over time, the computer-assisted dispatch system used by emergency responders has lagged.

As VPR's Charlotte Albright reports, that's going to change.

(Albright) Hartford Fire Chief Steve Locke has been waging a one-man campaign, urging Vermont's Department of Public Safety to build a faster link between Vermont's statewide 911 centers and the local dispatch centers that respond to those emergencies.

(Locke) "Right now when you dial 911, your information populates onto one computer screen. And then on another screen a dispatcher has to turn around and send those units out to whatever your emergency is. That dispatcher has to re-type all that information in, thereby slowing down what we call our alarm handling."

(Albright) Locke says even a half a minute devoted to that re-typing can make a big difference to a 911 caller.

To demonstrate, he walks down the hall to the control room.

Here's where dispatcher Scott Smith monitors a computer screen showing a map of the Hartford area. If a call comes in, a phone number icon immediately pops up at the caller's location.

(Smith) "And it provides the capability of the dispatcher to move the map around and basically walk the emergency responder to the scene if they are not familiar with the address."

(Albright) Smith says he calls responders on their cell phones to find out who is closest to the scene. But first he must type the information they need into a second computer dispatch system.  He wishes the two computers would talk to each other so he could skip the typing step.

(Smith) "It's cumbersome trying to deal with the caller, and dispatch the responding units at the same time. It's technically a delay when you're trying to do that which, with the new technology out there, cuts down on the delay and the response times."

(Albright) As Smith demonstrates the system, a real 911 call comes in, and it gets answered by another dispatcher at an adjacent desk. Chief Locke moves over to that work station.

(Locke) "Is that in our town? Okay so we can walk over.". . [Dispatcher: "Okay so he's in apartment four at the moment."]  "Okay, you can see on the screen, here's the address of the call, here's the map where it's occurred. She's re-entering the information here, where we want this information to automatically re-populate over here." [Disptacher: "Bob, Bob, hang on just a second, okay?. . .I'm going to send some help your way."]  

(Albright)  Locke's advocacy for a more seamless transfer of information from the 911 computer to his dispatchers' terminals is apparently paying off.  Francis Aumand directs Criminal Justice Services for Vermont's Department of Public Safety. He says a fix should be in place by summer.

(Aumand)  "The stars, if you will, are starting to align but it's been a very complicated process. We're getting an upgrade to our computer aided dispatch, we're getting new hardware and then we're mostly developing the interface."

(Albright) That's good news to Chief Locke, who says this upgrade has already been made in other parts of the country, including New Hampshire.

When the new server is up and running this summer, it will benefit every town in Vermont that receives and dispatches 911 calls.

For VPR News, I'm Charlotte Albright.