Pre-alarm announcments

[tbonetrexler]

I was thinking about this, after reading the "how are you alerted/how does it come across the scanner" thread. How many dispatch centers give a pre-alarm announcment?

Our dispatch goes kinda like this:

"KC: "Station 55 you have an alarm"

Tones drop for the station

KC "Station 55, medic 67, medic 65 for notification, trooper 2(or 4) is bieng alerted, an MVC with rollover (or entrapment, etc.) Bay Road, between False street and Fake street, 0954"

Im just wondering how many other dipatch centers do that pre-alarm announcement (ex. KC: "Station 55 you have an alarm")

Also, if you have it, do you like it?

Our county dispatch recently switched back to doing it after about a year of not doing it and just dropping tones.

[bobsnyder]

We have it, with a little different procedure...

Dispatches start with a pre-alert, such as (I'm doing this for a structure fire at my station address, just for demonstration):

[Long alert tone] Cumru Township, 453 Church Road, a structure fire, 1305

Then, pager tones and full dispatch:

[Pager tones] Company 42, Engine 67, Ladder 57, Cumru Township, 453 Church Road, cross streets of Welsh Road and Reed Street, a structure fire, 1307

Then, siren tones (if any) and a repeat of the dispatch, the time.

In this day and age, the prealert is of marginal usefullness. Years ago, the dispatchers would put out the prealert before looking up the run cards, punching in the tone codes, etc. There could be a few minutes between prealert and dispatch, during which time anyone who was monitoring could already be responding. With the equipment and systems we have today, with the CAD putting everything right up on the dispatcher's screen, the prealert really makes little difference. How long the county will continue to use it "because it's always been there" is anybody's guess.

[Stewart46]

Maybe a new guy question but here we go:

Why do they even have a "pre" announcment?

All we get are tones and away you go. Now that is a small volunteer department but I wonder why you warning for tones. Does that just pad your time from when you are tone to enroute times?

We get our departments tones and the comm center says what type of run it is, we still use signal codes (or whatever thsey are called)

"Paging for XXXX fire we have a report of a grass fire at XXXXX or please respond to a signal 19 at XXXX"

[bobsnyder]

Why do they even have a "pre" announcment?

Like I said in my post, it was put into our radio SOP decades ago when the dispatcher had to take the phone call him/herself, then physically look up the response on a paper run card in a Roladex, then program each pager tone sequence into the console and transmit them (one set at a time), then do the verbal dispatch. That process could take several minutes, so they inserted a prealert right after the phone call to alert anybody who was listening to the dispatch channel and speed up response.

As I also said...in the modern world, CAD systems, pre-programmed dispatch consoles, etc. make the prealert really a leftover from the past. It doesn't really hurt anything, but it doesn't help much, either.

[Stewart46]

I have heard some of our neighboring departments transmissions and theirs is something along the lines of "stand by for tones" and then the rest. Kind of like having the alarm clock go off before the time you really want to get up.

[backsteprescue123]

Negative on the prealert here. Just the good ol' tones. Once they drop, the dispatcher tells us where to go.

[tbonetrexler]

Why do they even have a "pre" announcment?



"Paging for XXXX fire we have a report of a grass fire at XXXXX or please respond to a signal 19 at XXXX"

Ussually the dispatcher makes the pre-announcement while the call is bieng taken (for medicals). For fire, it alerts those of us who are monitering that we have a call, and if we are at the station, it comes across the radios so we have a bit of warning, so that the big siren right over our heads dosent suprise the sh!it out of us. For about a year all we got was tones, and then they switched back. I personally kind of like it, im a whacker (j/k ) and ussually have my pager on scan.

PS We are a small volunteer department as well, and the dispatch center is for the whole county, minus the city and the airbase.


On another note, do they really say all that in the dispatch? We get very little info in the dispatch, and once a unit responds, they give that unit all the info they have.

[MEAN15]

We don't really have a pre-alert, but if you listen to the scanner, you can hear the PD dispatcher alerting the PD while the FD dispatcher is still on the phone with the RP.

[firedog21]

We don't have a pre alert tone, but usually while on dispatcher is on the phone with the caller, the second dispatcher will announce over the P.A. system that we have a call. It's nice to get that warning at night before the lights come on in the dorm and the alarm sounds.

Firedog21
I.A.F.F. Proud

[ndvfdff33]

Negative on the prealert here. Just the good ol' tones. Once they drop, the dispatcher tells us where to go.

Same here.

[NickMercer]

Well im gonna have to tell ya that we dont even get toned out. They just say XXXXX Fire we have a stucture fire in the 500 block of Washington Street.

We are also volunteer so we all drive to the scene and the guys that live the closest get the trucks. Pretty simple.

[Firefighter2230]

Well im gonna have to tell ya that we dont even get toned out. They just say XXXXX Fire we have a stucture fire in the 500 block of Washington Street.

We are also volunteer so we all drive to the scene and the guys that live the closest get the trucks. Pretty simple.

So you don't have any type of pager at all how in the world does that work at night?

A neighboring county dispatches like central to station/stations whatever report of a (incident type) and give a location.

We still have a siren so most of the time we can pick out our siren tone and start to get ready however thats nothing to give a great advantage since the pager tones follow shortly after.

[the1141man]

Why do they even have a "pre" announcment?

Now that is a small volunteer department but I wonder why you warning for tones. Does that just pad your time from when you are tone to enroute times?

Bingo. Combination dept here...the pre-alerts give the paid guys a few extra seconds to start getting ready, locking up the station, looking at maps if out of first-due, etc., before the "chute" time starts running (you have 2 mins from dispatch to "enroute" before a re-tone).

Pre-alerts are only done during "normal waking hours", typically 0800-2100, after that time they figure (correctly) most of the stations have turned their station radios and pagers to standby-alert mode by 2100.

Pre-alerts around here are really simple:
*three short beeps* (same as LE "priority traffic" tone in our county)
"Highway 41 at Highway 198, report of an injury traffic accident, single-vehicle rollover."

Then the station tones and the normal dispatch rigamarole.

[Slaytallica45]

yea we get a "pre-alarm" warning, usually just the company being dispatched and whether its fire/squad

ex.: on the county fire frequency you will here:

"45 fire alert"

[tones followed by dispatch message]

just replace 45 with any other company number in the county and thats how ours works.

[CPMiller]

Affirmative on the pre-alarm announcement. Our dispatch usually goes something like this -- Stand by for a Central City Fire (other agencies if needed) alert. *tones* Central City Fire needed to respond...