Communications center receives funding boost
By Riley Funk
The St. Joseph Fire Department is hoping to cut down on response time thanks to alert system improvements after the city council approved nearly $200,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding for the project.
The council unanimously approved $191,818.52 in ARPA funds for a maintenance project of the fire station dispatch and alert system at the communications center. The total cost of the project is $420,545.52.
Kurt Fuehrer, chief of training for the fire department, said one of the main focuses on getting a new system in place is to shave response time because every second counts.
“There’s a standard and it’s a clock that starts right when the call is received. They have 106 seconds to dispatch it. They’re going to take the call, gather the information, get it out to the stations and then we have a minute to get out of the house and on the road and get going,” Fuehrer said. “What we’re hoping is to get them under that 106 seconds of getting that information to us and we can get on the road quicker.”
Fuehrer said this has been a long time coming for the fire department; the process has been going on for five to seven years.
Improvements to the system will help not only firefighters but also dispatchers at the communication center.
“They’re a busy group up there. The hope is they can take a call, this (the new system) will dispatch the call. It’ll be a computer voice over the speakers. They (the dispatchers) can continue to gather information and that call will be dispatched much quicker,” Fuehrer said.
For firefighters, this is a benefit because the system will individualize the calls to specific stations, instead of the entire department.
According to city documents, the project is expected to begin on May 1. From there, it is said to be completed in 90 days.
Fuehrer said training will take some time to implement.
“There’s a lot to it. We have to teach the system, how to say some of the streets, some of the words. There’s a lot of moving parts with this. But we’re hoping to have it up before July,” Fuehrer said.
