New Dispatch Vs old SOC

[Zippy]

yeh RescueHazmat is right ....i wouldnt be able to keep a straight face dispatching adelaide fire to the radio...

[littlejohn]

why would you bother doing it without involving adelaide fire?

If you could get a page out of your own group base immediately, versus potentially having to call repeatedly to Adelaide fire.
I imagine you'd go with the option which was most likely to get the page out first.

[Zippy]

if you do page manually brigades...maybe ringing the Acknowledgement Line  (or more suitable landline to Adel Fire) to let them know you have...so they can prepare themselves.  Ensure smooth running of comm's .

[jaff]

It sounds like the operators at AF are constantly under the pump with multiple channels to monitor and answer, 000 calls to answer and despatch the relevant services too.
As professional's, I'm sure the operator's are expected to constantly monitor their service delivery and if there are any problem's actual or anticipated notify their superior's to either rectify the problem or put a procedure in place, to deal with the anticipated, if it occur's.

As a volie who has had a problem with AF not responding additional resource's when requested ,(yes problem will be identified on the issue's register)thankfully it did'nt alter the outcome of the incident,but it did give me cause for concern, as this was a reasonably mild day, friday 16th november,what might the outcome have been if it had been in two month's time and the bomber's had already been deployed elsewhere?

So my question's are these, are some of the teething problem's were experiencing related to the inadeqate number of comms ops at AF, who seem to have have an ever increasing work load? or the speed with which the changeover to AF CRD occured despite a risk assesment, which amongst other thing's I hear cautioned against a hasty changeover without all of the procedure's being already in place, as opposed to, policy on the run which ultimately occured.

Please don't take my comment's as a critisism of the comm's ops, who im sure are doing the best job they can under the circumstance's,beside's all of us are still learning to play by the new rules!
 

[Crank]

How bout instead of sitting here whinging you start lobbying your local politicians/vfba/cfs regional hq etc to get more staff and more training for those staff in Comms.

Comms guys/girls are doing the best they can with the resources and training they have...give them a break.

[chook]

Been there done that - politicians anyway. Haven't got a response yet though, however we need to be careful. On the one hand there is a definite need for extra funds but on the other can't be seen to be waisting it - refer to other posts. A proper case needs to be mounted, Are we expecting to much out of the commcen? Is it being used correctly? If the answer is no & yes and the problem is lack of staff then ok needs more bodies. However if the answer to the second question is NO then the problem is with the units/ brigades/ groups & that can be addressed differently. I have a funny feeling its a mixture of both.
cheers

[Robert-Robert34]

Maybe Adelaide Fire needs to start placing Positions Vacant ads in the local papers to cover the staff shortage thats a great way to boost the number of AF Comm Centre staff by hiring more people 

[Zippy]

Check the SA Government Vacancies regularly...

Id apply for Casual positions if they were offered.  Good way to escape the usual Tafe/Uni jobs eg supermarkets .

[6739264]

A good point has been raised here. There does need to be a way to categorise the urgency of messages on the radio.

[Robert-Robert34]

Check the SA Government Vacancies regularly...

Id apply for Casual positions if they were offered.  Good way to escape the usual Tafe/Uni jobs eg supermarkets .

Same here Zippy it would be a good paying job too plus i'd be able to monitor 3 radios at once taking the load off of the Adelaide Fire Staff 

[Comms]

There's no point advertising for more operators because we have enough people to fill the positions deemed necesary. What we need is more positions approved.

As for radios not being answered. I wont answer if the message ends with 'out'. So many times brigades will book mobile followed by 'out' and obviously don't require a response. Could this be part of the problem?

[Zippy]

If u hear the message,  its not a problem  ,  because the objective of the radio message has been completed.

[bittenyakka]

I never said you should respond other brigades without involving Adelaide fire i just asked how.

[Alan (Big Al)]

A good point has been raised here. There does need to be a way to categorise the urgency of messages on the radio.

Doesn't NSW fire services (can't remember which one) run a numbered or colour system to denote the urgency of the message??

[Alan J]

A good point has been raised here. There does need to be a way to categorise the urgency of messages on the radio.

Doesn't NSW fire services (can't remember which one) run a numbered
or colour system to denote the urgency of the message??

Yes they do.  I hear that some parts of NSWRFS even use it. 
Red, Yellow & Blue denote urgent, important & routine respectively.
Idea is to help comms hub of busy network sort out which ones to deal with first.
Example:
"District CommCen this is Wotterbuggerup one alpha. Red.  Need Bulk water this location."
NSWRFS situation is perhaps a little different to us in that much of their operational comms is supposed to go to their district or zone commcen (equivalent
of a Regional comms) rather than to their brigade or group. So there's much more
opportunity for commcen overload than in our model.
They may use other colours too, but these are the 3 I know of.
cheers

[boredmatrix]

Maybe Adelaide Fire needs to start placing Positions Vacant ads in the local papers to cover the staff shortage thats a great way to boost the number of AF Comm Centre staff by hiring more people 

be careful what you wish for- putting Civvies in operational ComCens without appropriate operational exposure (ie:a full year or 10 of it!!) can only lead to lots of trouble!!

[6739264]

A good point has been raised here. There does need to be a way to categorise the urgency of messages on the radio.

Doesn't NSW fire services (can't remember which one) run a numbered or colour system to denote the urgency of the message??

Yes, both do.

NSWRFS uses:

"Emergency" - Life threatening situation.
"Red" - Urgent Incident Message
"Blue" - General Incident Message
"Yellow" - Logistics/Non-Incident Message

NSWFB uses:

"Red" or "Red, Red, Red" - Urgent Incident Message
"Blue" - General Incident Message
"Green" - Non-Urgent, Incident Stop Message
"Yellow" - Non-Urgent, Non-Incident Related Message
"White" or "White, White, White" - Reporting of new incident.

So your radio comms will look like:

"Sydney comms, Flyer one, Red"
"Flyer one, pass your red message"
"Sydney comms, Flyer one, Red, from [Location} Building well alight, multiple persons trapped, requesting 5th alarm.

[bajdas]

Maybe Adelaide Fire needs to start placing Positions Vacant ads in the local papers to cover the staff shortage thats a great way to boost the number of AF Comm Centre staff by hiring more people 

be careful what you wish for- putting Civvies in operational ComCens without appropriate operational exposure (ie:a full year or 10 of it!!) can only lead to lots of trouble!!

Personally, I have no issues with a person with little 'on road experience' completing call receipt. This has been happening at times for many years with SES volunteers operating the SES SCC.

The dispatch staff normally have some 'on road' experience though.

Training is the key and the ability for 'checks & balances' to be included in the call receipt & dispatch process is essential.

It will be interesting to see what systems MFS, SES and CFS have 'in place' when a high risk day or major emergency hits in the next few months. I know SES system is currently being 'tweaked'.

[boredmatrix]

true andrew - Tis what we in SAAS thought as well - call-takers=no problems. 

....until some hare-brained idiot decided that these same call-takers could become despatchers as well!!

now, unless the person who is the despatcher has a bit of nouse - and LOTS of local knowledge - it's just a mess!! 

[Blue]

Refreshing to read that some people in the Emergency Services still have their head screwed on and can see that Comcen is doing the best it can with the skills and resources available, and not taking an anti-MFS viewpoint over it all. The sad thing to see is certain people down here using the delays in paging to drive an even bigger wedge between services. There's been talk of public meetings, lets hope they can take a step back and remember what we are all here for.

That said, I think paging delays are unacceptable, question being what is and what can be done about it? Or do we wait for a coroner's report to tell us what to do...

I'm on the edge of quitting because of the unprofessional comments and actions I've seen from a service I was once very committed to. What volunteer wants to join a service with so much infighting, backstabbing and b!tching? Bugger the lot of them, go and help Meals on Wheels instead.

[6739264]

I'm on the edge of quitting because of the unprofessional comments and actions I've seen from a service I was once very committed to. What volunteer wants to join a service with so much infighting, backstabbing and b!tching? Bugger the lot of them, go and help Meals on Wheels instead.

I totally agree with you mate.

[Robert-Robert34]

As i've said in another thread on here there was an article in today's Border Watch about paging delays to that accident which happened last week

[rescue5271]

We had a hay stack fire the other day and when we did a manual page for two more brigade's I had to call adelaide fire to say what we had done,Our brigade captain and group comms officer where not aware of this new requirment. So may be its time we where all kept up to date on what we have to do. Sad part about all of this one of our DGO's did acknowledge the first response page only to have adelaide fire call the base via phone to see if we where going to acknowledge the page some 4 mins later...looks like right hand in comms forgot to tell left hand.....

I think its fair to say that the work load in comms is going to be very high and i can see more group bases having to open and do their own paging when adelaide is busy......

[Pipster]

We had a Group Ops meeting last night, and were told that in most cases, only one brigade will be dispatched to calls, and it will be up to either the Group Duty officer, or the brigade, to call for additional brigades to be responded.   I think this refers mainly to brigades who were not previously dispatched by MFS (prior to the change over)- so their data is not in BOMS.

Can anyone from Adelaide Fire clarify this for us ?


Pip

[bittenyakka]

I spoke to a person from adelaide fire and that was the method of solving the lack of local knowledge pronblem