Change in Dispatch Center

My fire jurisdiction is planning to change its dispatching agency. We currently use a regional county dispatch center; and due to a change in radio systems, we will be switching to a city police dispatch center.<br />Fire alarm monitoring companies have been given a certain telephone number over the years to call in order to reach our dispatch center when they receive signals from automatic fire alarm and fire sprinkler monitoring systems in our jurisdiction.

All of a sudden that telephone number will not be any good. We need to get it changed. Since there are any number of monitoring companies out there (and we don't really have a list)... we think this is a BIG problem for us.

Anyone had to do this before, or know a jurisdiction (police or fire) that has?

Call fowarding may help you till you get eveyone on the same page.

Also make sure you know which agency has priority when it comes to setting out alarm, our people really hate having PD being advised of the call before we do. <br />Is The center staffed to handle a large fire/ems incident and several domestics at the same time???

<br />Terry

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: engel702 ]</p>

Will your new dispatch be in the same area code as the regional center? If so, call forwarding or simply having the number transferred to the new center would solve the problem if you do not incurr excessive long distance fees.

When we went from seven digit numbers to E-911, the recommendation was to let the old numbers active for at least five years. The old numbers roll over to 911. This was done for those who never reprogram the speed dial or had the number written on the wall in the shop.

The numbers are still active as admin numbers to dispatch so lost calls have been few.

The problem can not be solved by forwarding the telephone line to the new dispatch center. If we simply did that, we would be forwarding ALL of the calls that the old regional dispatch center receives (i.e. calls for other fire and police departments, which would then have to be forwarded back by the new dispatch center to the regional dispatch center).

We cover two "cities" (which are really "towns" where I grew up) and some portions of at least four unincorporated counties. For political reasons, we need to leave the dispatching for a portion of our jurisdiction with the old dispatch center and the remainder of our dispatching will go to the new. So the plan is to have two dispatch centers on one frequency controlling our units. The dispatch centers will have the same computer systems and will be linked together; so that in theory we don't have both dispatchers trying to send the same unit(s) to two different places at the same time.

We all know it will be a headache, but that is politics for you.

I am hoping that someone knows of a way to change the telephone number other than a massive letter writing campaign.

We have a similiar set up. We cover portions of two counties with all of our initial dispatching handled by one county. We then work with the appropiate dispatch center during the call. The dispatch centers can transfer calls including the 911 screen at the touch of a button.

You need to talk to the people designing the system to set this up. The only drawback is that one center may want a fee for initially handling the call.

The Chief and Deputy Chief are handling the setup of how the dispatch centers talk to each other. As far as we have been told, call hand-offs will be via a telephone call between the two dispatching agencies (that don't seem to always work smoothly together).

In the Fire Prevention Division, we are anticipating... and trying to tackle... the telephone number problem that we will encounter with the fire alarm monitoring companies. A hand-off between dispatchers will take time if handled via telephone. One of the agencies has been known to keep the other on hold for minutes when transferring calls. If 911 screens are exchanged with the touch of a button, then we should have no problem at all; but we are trying to anticipate how to fix the call hand-off problem if it arises.

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: NMFRDBureau64 ]</p>