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Kansas City Fire Department Installs Public Safety Automation System

Missouri agency adds CAD and records management.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The Kansas City Fire Department installed a new computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management system (RMS). The fire department currently processes more than 50,000 fire and rescue incident reports annually. Yet the department needed a more fully integrated system to centralize and automate fire incident, personnel and training, and equipment inspections information that used to reside on separate, disparate databases or in paper files.

The new CAD system from CompuDyne replaces an outdated system, and will allow dispatchers to respond to and manage citizen's requests for fire and rescue services more efficiently. "Installing a reliable system is critical to any public safety operation," said Rick Brisbin, project manager for Kansas City. "We have not experienced any downtime since we took the system live." A comprehensive mapping component pinpoints the exact location of a citizen's call for service. The map provides dispatchers the ability to quickly assess the location of the incident and provide responding firefighters directions or details of the building, if required. The CAD system automatically pinpoints the caller's location, recommends appropriate apparatus to respond, alerts the fire stations and tracks the details of the fire response.

During a subsequent phase of the project, devices that track the exact location of a vehicle and assist in determining the shortest route to an incident will be installed in Kansas City's fire apparatus.

Later in the project, Kansas City will implement a comprehensive CAD, RMS and automated field reporting system for the Police Department. "The installation of the fire dispatch and records management system is the beginning of an enterprisewide public safety automation system for the city's police and fire departments," said Brisbin. "Sharing information between police and fire is crucial to rapid responses, and is the big payoff of this new system for the departments."
Miriam Jones is a former chief copy editor of Government Technology, Governing, Public CIO and Emergency Management magazines.