How Do You Get The Call Out?
For years now the primary source of notifying volunteer and call firefighters has been via pagers that beep or vibrate, depending on your preference and tolerance for getting startled out of a dead sleep at 2:00 am. This has been a reliable means of communication and I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. In most places, gone are the days of the whistle or siren on the roof of the fire station. To the ones who still hold on to this classic tradition, good on you!
For the generations before us, the whistle or siren was the only way of being notified of a call. For the stations with whistles, it usually worked alongside the Gamewell box system, or something similar. The blasts of the horn would be counted out much like you would count the bells when a box would ring in. Members would count the blasts and then know where to go for the incident.
Technology has taken us a long way. With the rise of mobile devices such as smart phones, the use of automatic text messaging systems programmed into CAD systems at dispatch is on the rise. IMC, being one of them, has the ability of sending out a text page with the incident type and incident location the second the call is entered into the computer. You can customize what types of incidents get paged automatically, and there is the ability of manually sending additional pages with incident updates.
I am interested in seeing who still uses the old ways of notification such as the station sirens and whistles. Who is using other means of communication? Go ahead and share in the comments section or on our Facebook account.
