JAMAICA FIRE BRIGADE TO IMPLEMENT FIRST-WORLD COMMUNCATIONS SYSTEM TO CUT RESPONSE TIMES TO FIRE CALLS
Jamaicans are shortly to benefit from the operations of the Jamaica Fire Brigade’s new Emergency Communication Centre, which is a telecommunications-driven project designed to significantly reduce firefighters’ responses to fire emergency calls.
In making this disclosure during the Sectoral Debate, Portfolio Minister Hon. Desmond McKenzie said that the Emergency Communication Centre will effectively reduce the time between the making of an emergency call to the roll-out of firefighters from their Stations, to a total of 124 seconds (two minutes and four seconds) in line with international fire response standards. The Emergency Communication Centre, which is based at the Waterford Fire Station in St. Catherine, is manned by twenty-four firefighters who were specially trained and graduated as Emergency Telecommunicators in February this year.
“A key feature of this Centre is the Automatic Station Alerting System, which will transmit emergency notifications instantly to Fire Stations, thereby dramatically reducing dispatch times. If you make a call, the Emergency Telecommunicators will process the information within 64 seconds. That information is then transmitted instantly to the relevant Fire Station, and the firefighters there will leave the Fire Station 60 seconds after that to respond to the emergency. This is a total response time of 2 minutes and 4 seconds, which will put the Fire Brigade perfectly in line with international best practices”
This ground-breaking project is being implemented in two phases. “All the Fire Stations in Kingston, St. Andrew and St. Catherine, are part of Phase 1, which is active now. These parishes have the highest volume of emergency calls, the greatest population density and the highest fire risk exposure. Phase 2 will commence in the next financial year, and includes all the remaining Fire Stations island-wide. The York Park Fire Station will be the base for the Emergency Communication Centre in Phase 2.”
In stating that he will launch the Emergency Communication Centre shortly, Minister McKenzie declared that this project has projected the Jamaica Fire Brigade into a new dimension of professionalism and technological readiness.