60-Control handling of calls

[BFD1054 1,552]

Just wanted to give credit where credit is due! Hats off to the fine men and women at 60 for a job well done tonight!

I know how crazy it was is my neck of the woods, i can just imagine the rest of the county. The airways were close to impossible to talk on for awhile due to the insane number of alarms occuring in a short amount of time.

For all the chaos in the county, 60 had a great handle on it all (in my opinion) and deserve a pat on the back! Some may say its there job to handle it, but its these rare occasions where they must go above and beyond with such a crazy ammount of calls coming in!

Soo....job well done tonight to the ladies & gents at 60!

[res6cue 67]

Wish the same could be said across the river. As usual, once there are more than a handful of calls on the air at once, everything in Rockland goes straight to hell. Most of the blame lies with the individual depts though, who you would think by this point would have a plan for operating during times of heavy call volume. Instead, you have every single individual unit in the county transmitting over the same channel. They act as if they're the only ones on the air. On top of that, 44-Control insists on doing a full dispatch for every call, even if that dept is already on the air. I often wonder why we have so many low band and UHF channels if no one actually ever uses them. Rockland really cracks me up. There are times we can be so efficient and progressive, while other times we're stuck in 1955. The idea that a 30+ million dollar countywide trunking system will somehow magically alleviate every single problem is laughable, really it is. We can't figure out how to properly and efficiently use the system we've had for over half a century! A radio system is only as good as the people operating it, I don't care how hi-tech it is. Furthermore, I think it should be mandatory for dispatchers to have some FD/PD/EMS experience so they have a clue as to what is actually happening on the other end of the radio. It's a fact, every great dispatcher at 44-Control has ties to emergency services. Of course whenever the turds hit the fan, like tonight, none of them are working. Never fails.

/rant

[CAM502 6]

It rained today??

[SHFD781 0]

Just wanted to give credit where credit is due!  Hats off to the fine men and women at 60 for a job well done tonight! 

I know how crazy it was is my neck of the woods, i can just imagine the rest of the county.  The airways were close to impossible to talk on for awhile due to the insane number of alarms occuring in a short amount of time.

For all the chaos in the county, 60 had a great handle on it all (in my opinion) and deserve a pat on the back!  Some may say its there job to handle it, but its these rare occasions where they must go above and beyond with such a crazy ammount of calls coming in!

Soo....job well done tonight to the ladies & gents at 60!

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BFD1054 is right credit should be given where it is due. I know from being a dispatcher that you don't always get the credit you deserve. I can not hear 60 Control from where I live (plus I was sleeping cause I am working tonight), but I'm sure they did a great job. I always hear that too where we're supposed to be able to handle it if it is busy cause that's what we're trained for. It's still nice to get a good job every once in a while from the people that we are sending all over the place. I try to give credit where it is due to my dispatchers here in CT. Anyways good job to 60 Control and everyone else in the area on a busy night.

[trauma74 111]

Wish the same could be said across the river. As usual, once there are more than a handful of calls on the air at once, everything in Rockland goes straight to hell. Most of the blame lies with the individual depts though, who you would think by this point would have a plan for operating during times of heavy call volume. Instead, you have every single individual unit in the county transmitting over the same channel. They act as if they're the only ones on the air. On top of that, 44-Control insists on doing a full dispatch for every call, even if that dept is already on the air. I often wonder why we have so many low band and UHF channels if no one actually ever uses them. Rockland really cracks me up. There are times we can be so efficient and progressive, while other times we're stuck in 1955. The idea that a 30+ million dollar countywide trunking system will somehow magically alleviate every single problem is laughable, really it is. We can't figure out how to properly and efficiently use the system we've had for over half a century! A radio system is only as good as the people operating it, I don't care how hi-tech it is. Furthermore, I think it should be mandatory for dispatchers to have some FD/PD/EMS experience so they have a clue as to what is actually happening on the other end of the radio. It's a fact, every great dispatcher at 44-Control has ties to emergency services. Of course whenever the turds hit the fan, like tonight, none of them are working. Never fails.

/rant

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If you think that Rockland is bad when it comes to dispatching and too much radio traffic, you should listen to Orange County one night!!!

[IzzyEng4 427]

Man it was rocking in Norther New Haven County, Fairfield and Litchfield last night. I can just imagine what ya'll went through just west of me. As a dispatcher i know how it is when it gets crazy. Kudos to my fellow dispatchers to the north and the west, now get a beer or a coffee, you deserve it!

[spin_the_wheel 460]

In Nassau it is just as bad...at least at the start of a bad storm.....almost all the FD's dispatched by the county have base station radios and the norm now is that a dept. member trained in the radio opps. will man the base station during a T-storm, snow standby or like in the case of the blackout a few years back, from that point on Nassau Firecom will give additonal alarms to the base station opp. via landline. Which usually amounts to "1 automatic alarm, 3 wires calls, and 1 water investigation" The base station acts as a command post of sorts and assigns units as needed. This cuts down on alot of radio traffic as additional alarms are now handled on high bands or respond without calling county fire.

Dept,s who dispatch themselves 24/7 will not transmit further alarms with tones, after the first few calls they may tone out for all manpower to respective stations and then assign units on high bands.

[Monty 35]

In Nassau it is just as bad...at least at the start of a bad storm.....almost all the FD's dispatched by the county have base station radios and the norm now is that a dept. member trained in the radio opps. will man the base station during a T-storm, snow standby or like in the case of the blackout a few years back, from that point on Nassau Firecom will give additonal alarms to the base station opp. via landline. Which usually amounts to "1 automatic alarm, 3 wires calls, and  1 water investigation"  The base station acts as a command post of sorts and assigns units as needed.  This cuts down on alot of radio traffic as additional alarms are now handled on high bands or respond without calling county fire.   

Dept,s who dispatch themselves 24/7 will not transmit further alarms with tones, after the first few calls they may tone out for all manpower to respective stations and then assign units on high bands.

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Sounds like a good dose of common sense Up North they used vhf high band for the pagers and fire traffic was on UHF trunking. The voice would be on both, but at least you wouldn't get tones on the fire traffic. At times, they'd also split the town up geograpichally and dispatch on different frequencies and finally if you had something, then you'd switch to an alternate frequency.

Listening to 46.26 last night you couldn't help but step on someone at times - there was no dead air.

[Guest KFD236]

Without a doubt these dispatchers deserve a lot of credit for last night and all the other days, they always do a good job. Good luck to them tonight and tommorrow cause they are gonna have to do it all over again.

Thanks a lot

[Guest]

Definetly a top notch job by the professional dispatchers at 60 Control, especially given the inferior radio and many different SOP's they have to deal with. It's so crazy, I don't know how they do it. They deserve a lot of credit.