Orange County 911 Text Paging for EMS & FDs

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The Orange County Emergency Communications Center has recently starting using new software that sends out text pages for FD & EMS calls to members of these agencies that are signed up to receive them. The software is called Emergent and can have up to 10,000 users entered into the system. It sends EMS or FD call info to any device capable of receiving text messages such as cell phones, Blackberry & Treo devices, AlphaNumeric Pagers and it also can send to email addresses.

In the recent test phase of this system, everything has been working well and the text pages have been coming over seconds after the voice page for the call is done being transmitted.

This system is available to ALL members of any of the FDs & EMS agencies that are dispatched via the Orange County Emergency Communications Center. It will serve as a secondary means of receiving fire and EMS jobs. It will come in handy for calls that are sensitive in nature such as bomb threats or anything that is not normally dispatched via voice page. Also in the works is the paging of all times for EMS agencies and for Duty Chief/Duty Officer notifications.

After seeing that several other counties in our area had this type of system, I made a written request about two years ago for the County to look into getting this type of system. The credit for the research, purchase and implementation of this new system goes to Supervisor Emmet Garnham.