On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Edmund A. Hintz wrote:
But, the fire service was hit fairly hard. The reporting system is also used for turnouts, and was down, so the comm centers had to page everyone out manually.
For those not au fait with how things work for the Fire Service, they use a Computer Aided Dispatch system that, amongst other things, automatically sends pages out based on appliances being attached to a call. The loss of i/CAD meant that pages had to be sent using manual paging terminals, from lists of pager numbers. It's not efficient, by any stretch of the imagination. *SNIP*
had to be verbally radioed in. I understand that in Northland the paging systems were out entirely, and they were on siren/verbal turnout only up
Not just Northland, Auckland too. No paging==no station alarms or speakers, no automatic doors, etc. It was ALL being done by RT, which meant that stations had to keep a radio on in order to be alerted to calls. It was fortunate that Murphy, having chosen to strike the Fire Service over Guy Fawkes weekend, didn't interject further with a major incident while things were running on hard-copy. Another major service provided by i/CAD is that fire appliances can use DTMF-over-RF to keep the computer appraised of the appliance's availability or its disposition in relation to a call. Losing that meant that every move by an appliance had to be spoken verbally, and confirmed verbally, greatly increasing the radio time required for absolutely everything.
there. And lastly, I hear that some Ambo comms were out entirely, though don't know any more about it (Messrs Poole or Foster may have more on that).
Only heard about the ambulance issue at second hand. They rely pretty heavily on cellphones anyway, so being deprived of radios isn't necessarily a significant imposition on their normal operations. Unsurprisingly, the media only half reported on how serious this outage was for the Fire Service. Explaining it to reporters in sufficient clarity that they can then put it in print for the great unwashed is no small ask. I've only summarised very lightly how it all works. -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer."