Building Renovated to House Expanded Dispatch Center
A new fire control center for Onondaga County, N.Y., has been established in a renovated building that formerly housed a juvenile detention center.
Because of crowded conditions caused by a heavy increase in fire and other emergency responses, there was a need to expand the countywide dispatching center that could not be accommodated at the center’s longtime location in the fire station in Mattydale, a suburb north of Syracuse. Therefore, the problem was placed before County Executive John Mulroy by the Onondaga Fire Chiefs Association and the Onondaga County Volunteer Firemen’s Association.
The County legislature appropriated $470,000 to buy electronic equipment and renovate the vacant detention center on Onondaga Hill, a central location in the county that had been suggested by veteran dispatcher Howie Carr. However, because of rapidly escalating construction costs, the county legislature provided $105,000 more to both supplement the original appropriation and pay for engineering services to design a microwave system.
Later, an additional $460,000 was appropriated for a multichannel microwave system to link 11 countywide data processing terminals for fire, EMS, police and five Syracuse hospitals with the Onondaga County Fire Control Center.
Three-position console
The building renovation was completed last February and the radio repair service assembled an interim setup for the new location. Using existing, spare and homemade gear, the center went on the air last Feb. 3. The first call was for a partition fire in Bridgeport.
Last summer the communications console was delivered. It contains dual phone positions for receiving and dispatching alarms. The regular radio channel, 46.14 MHz; secondary channel, 46.22 MHz; command frequency, 46.06 MHz; fireground channel, 46.26 MHz; inter-county frequency 45.88 MHz; and a secondary ambulance channel, 46.00 MHz, are controlled at these positions.
The third console position is primarily for emergency medical services. In addition to the countywide ambulance dispatching frequency, 45.96 MHz, there are telemetry channels. The new equipment operates on a four-zone concept: downtown (City of Syracuse), county east, county west and countywide. The latter is a backup channel. This system will ensure two good channels available anywhere in the county, in addition to med-9 and med-10, the nationwide calling frequency for outof-town ambulances. There will be a 10-channel base station available for use during disasters.
The Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse is a resource hospital for an 11county area. The county fire control is the communications hub for it.
Additional facilities
Other features of the new control center include the availability to broadcast simultaneously on all frequencies, a radio-to-telephone patch capability, backup facilities for other local emergency services and a disaster command post. An Apple II desk top computer with three small disk storage units makes available on two screens or on hard copy apparatus inventories, department vehicle status, automatic mutual aid programs, special hazard pre-plans and alarm reports.
In other parts of the building are the offices of County Fire Coordinator Michael Waters and Assistant Coordinator Richard Beach, instructional rooms for firematic courses, offices for the cause and origin team and storage areas.
The 12 dispatchers all must have New York State emergency medical technician certification and at least two years affiliation with the fire service.
Photo by J. Battle