County Publishes Emergency Call Information Online, Slashing Media Inquiries

The Montgomery County, Pa., Department of Public Safety used to receive 50 to 100 calls daily from media inquiring about traffic accidents and road hazards that would snarl traffic. To alleviate the large volume of phone calls, the department collaborated with the county’s IT department and developed a Web site that provides the public with information about active fire and emergency medical services calls as well as traffic incidents from the county’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system.

As a result, the public safety department has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of calls from media about traffic accidents and hazards. “There are some days where we might get one or two in a 24-hour period when we were doing 50 to 100 in the 24-hour period before,” said Sean Petty, Montgomery County, Pa.’s deputy director of public safety for communications and technology.

The Web site gets around 60,000 hits a month, Petty said.

The Web site, launched in November 2009, provides summaries including the incident number, the resources deployed and if they have arrived on scene, and the incident location, which also is plotted on a Google map. The site also provides a link to the county’s live emergency medical services and fire radio communications.

The data on the site is pulled from the county’s CAD system every five minutes. As dispatchers enter information from calls into the system, the data is pushed to the Web automatically based on a set of criteria. “We didn’t want to have somebody that had to manually approve incidents or anything like that,” Petty said.

In addition to providing the public with information, the system also improves incident commanders’ situational awareness. “It allows an incident commander or a manager to see where units are and when they go on scene and specifically where an incident is,” he said.

Petty’s team, working with the county IT department, also developed a text-only mobile version of the incident status page. It allows managers, police chiefs and fire chiefs to quickly pull up the information on their mobile device without having to launch a full Web browser.

Petty called the site the most comprehensive WebCAD site he’s seen. “Based on the research that I did and the other sites that I saw, I don’t know of any other that has all the same features that ours does and is so automatic and gives people the ability to update the events, shows them incident notes and has the BlackBerry version of it and the RSS feed,” he said. “I didn’t find any other system that had all of those things in addition to the Google Maps integration.”
 
[Photo courtesy of Mary Pellegrino/FEMA.]