Until December 2010, the City of Berkeley Fire Department’s dispatching was done through multiple ring-down phone line circuits, and many stations had three or more separate circuits. Though this worked for the fire department for years, they were ready to improve their fire station alerting and response times.
ComTech Communications was awarded the contract to replace the department's fire station alerting systems, including systems at the fire stations and at the dispatch center. One of the main operational criteria set by the department was to be NFPA 1221 compliant and create a redundant alerting system.
ComTech provided a Radio (RF) and WAN/LAN alerting solution to for alerting redundancy, increased response time, and company based alerting with alerting status feedback capabilities. A Zetron M25 encoder was installed and integrated with the city’s radio system, providing paging to their pagers, and a VoIP audio option is now available as an alternate audio source. Overhead station paging is supported through the user’s interface and/or through the department’s phone systems.
Automatic dispatching is accomplished through an interface created between the department’s dispatch CAD system and the ComTech Fire alert controller. The fire alert controller receives the dispatch requests automatically or manually through the user interface and simultaneously sends the alert information to each fire station and pager over the radio system and city network communication links. This helps ensure the stations receive the dispatch alert, as well as personnel carrying pagers.
At each fire station, a ComTech 10 fire station alerting system was installed supporting both whole station and company base alerting systems. The head-end system equipment, amplifiers, radio and network interfaces are all backed up by an uninterruptible power supply.
Berkeley’s station side alerting requirements were to support: fast and multi-station alerting and paging, local emergency notifications, fire fighter friendly red LED and company based alert lighting and night vision, remotely controlled radio monitoring, overhead P.A. paging and system reset functions.
