The Burnaby Fire Department will be better able to communicate with other emergency services, now that its dispatch system is being integrated with B.C. Ambulance Services.
Burnaby council brought down a capital reserves expenditure bylaw on Monday night, allotting $140,000 for computer hardware, software and consultation services for the integration.
The fire dispatch system integration will mean the department and B.C. Ambulance Services will be able to automatically transfer data, according to a report from the city's director of finance, Denise Jorgenson.
Currently, B.C. Ambulance Services obtains information from a website where incidents are transcribed by its dispatchers.
The Burnaby Fire Department's dispatchers respond to an alarm at the department's end, get the information from the ambulance services website and transcribe it to the department's dispatch system, to go out to Burnaby fire trucks.
If there are problems with the Internet connection, the department has to call ambulance services for updates, according to the report.
With the integration, ambulance services will automatically transfer incident reports to the Burnaby Fire Department's dispatch service.
This would mean the local fire department would receive information at the same time as other fire departments in the Lower Mainland, according to the report, and would allow agencies in different jurisdictions to communicate if a major incident should occur.
In 2011, upgrades to the fire department's dispatch system allowed mobile computers on fire trucks to be able to get information from the computer-aided dispatch system on the way to an incident, according to the report.
E-Comm, which answers 911 calls in the Lower Mainland, and B.C. Ambulance Services have used the same Intergraph Computer Aided Dispatch platform as the city since 2007.
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