County fire chiefs unhappy with paging system
Staff writer
County firefighters say they are not getting pages and Active 911 alerts — or are getting them too late to matter.
Goessel Fire Chief Matt Voth sent an email July 26 to Sheriff Jeff Soyez, Administrator Tina Spencer, commissioners, and other fire chiefs citing problems firefighters are having.
“Active alert has not been working over the last several months,” Voth wrote.
He called the service “consistently inconsistent.”
Voth recently was paged to a grass fire spreading into a tree line. When he arrived, he was one of only two responders despite 12 being available. Firefighters had been paged by radio, but Active 911 alerts had not come through, he said.
On July 26, radio dispatches for a structure fire on the Marion/Dickinson county line were so garbled that Active 911 became necessary.
“But no one got one,” Voth said.
Herington Fire Chief Andrew Avantagiato said the fire, reported at 3:48 a.m., was three miles southwest of Herington.
He called for help from Lincolnville, Lost Springs, and Ramona. Only Ramona responded, bringing one truck and two firefighters.
Radio pages and Avantagiato’s original request for them from the scene were clearly monitored in Marion but apparently not heard elsewhere.
County emergency manager Marcy Hostetler said one recent Active 911 failure might have been caused by a widespread communications outage that affected banks, airports, hospitals, and other businesses.
“This particular situation, it looks like Active 911 had an outage because the day after the incident, we got an email explaining that the outage was fixed,” she said. “Even though this particular one spurred one failure that is explainable, it doesn’t explain all the others.”
Hostetler said the county’s facilities and technology operations director, Coby Hayes, was trying to trace where and why Active 911 breakdowns might be happening. It might be a software problem, a hardware problem, or a program problem, she said.
“Because of the inconsistency, it’s little bit harder to track,” Hostetler said. “What is causing these weird instances that are not routine?”
Herington has a mutual assistance agreement with fire departments in the northern portion of Marion County.
“I hope they get it figured out because it’s important,” Avantagiato said.
He has a Marion County fire radio and was clearly heard by a Ramona firefighter and on the newspaper’s monitor in Marion. He’s unclear why Lincolnville and Lost Springs firefighters apparently did not hear him.
Getting data about where things are going wrong and getting it into the hands of the right person is key to solving the problem, former head county dispatcher Michele Abbot said. She now works with Kansas Office of Emergency Communications.
Voth said many volunteer firefighters don’t carry their radios with them, apparently even at night. They rely on Active 911 alerts on their cell phone and don’t want to take $2,500 radios into cattle pens, factories, and other hazardous conditions in which the radios could be damaged.
Spencer said the county needs to address firefighters not keeping radios with them at all times.