ORANA Rural Fire Service (RFS) became the newest region to start using a new system designed to improve the way crews are dispatched to incidents.
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Orana RFS team manager Superintendent Lyndon Wieland said the system came online locally on Monday after it was trialled in Mid North Coast, Waringah Pittwater and Shoalhaven RFS areas.
The computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system would see calls to triple-0 incidents received by specialist dispatch officers who could query and record incident information and notify the nearest brigade to respond to the incident.
"For instance, previously the local RFS duty officer could get a triple-0 call while they are driving, so they're in traffic and they have to pull over, take the call, bring up their computer and set pagers and radios off, take logs and it's not the ideal environment to do so," Superintendent Wieland said.
"Under CAD, state operations in Sydney will take the call directly from the triple-0 system, gather all the information, get an address and bring up the Dubbo local government area on the screen, for instance, and the truck closest to that address will flash on the screen, so they know which brigade they have to page."
While volunteer firefighters would not notice a major difference, Superintendent Wieland said, the new system would see state operations handle all the radio calls and requests that the brigades might make while they are on the scene of an incident.
"If the fire starts to escalate and becomes a really big fire, then we have the ability to isolate state operations and handle it here as we used to, as we put an incident management team together. Previously, the duty officer would have to manually go in, select the brigade, set the pagers off, and then handle the radio systems," he said.
"More than ever, the public is demanding information on fires, and we now have to go into an electronic system to keep the public informed.
"It's physically not possible to do all of this when things are getting that busy.
"Instead of being on a radio and setting pagers off we will have other people doing that for us.
"In the early stages, we'll have somebody in Sydney looking after all that for us while we are starting to get things organised back here for an incident management team.
"Most of all, it frees the local staff up to support the volunteers who are fighting the fire, to get them aeroplanes, heavy plant, water, all the things they call for when the fire starts to escalate, particularly in the summer."
Superintendent Wieland said he had already begun providing feedback regarding any potential teething problems.
"We are the first of the real rural areas to come on, and it's in its early stages but the idea is to get it to work across the state," he said.
