County makes the switch to digital emergency system
Nick Johansen
The Red Oak Express
Montgomery County’s new communications system is operational and has already been proven effective.
At 10 a.m. on May 12, the county made the switch to the new system on the Iowa Statewide Inoperable Communications System. Less than 30 minutes later, at 10:26 a.m., the Red Oak Fire Department was called to the scene of a fire at Red Oak Fabrication for a report of a fire inside a blast booth in the building.
Firefighters were at the scene at 10:30 a.m., and the fire was under control by 10:39 a.m.,
“The personnel were doing some maintenance on the blast booth and using a grinder. Some of the embers got into the filter system and set nine of the filters on fire. Employees utilized fire extinguishers in the facility to slow the fire, and our engine crew extinguished the remainder of the fire,” said Red Oak Fire Chief John Bruce.
Preliminary damage estimates were $2,500, but the dollar amount could increase after they check the system.
“The key note here is that we switched the system, and were almost immediately working a fire in a factory, and the radios worked. I was able to be in multiple locations in the facility and maintain radio access. It worked great,” said Bruce.
Bruce said from his department’s standpoint, it is a relief to have a reliable system in place.
“It takes the weight off your shoulders to know that we have reliable communications. For years, there were times you could throw your radio farther than you could talk on it. It comes down to the safety of our first responders. There were times when the dispatcher was trying to get a hold of them, and couldn’t reach them,” commented Bruce. “Now we have radios that we can use to communicate from Council Bluffs and Omaha hospitals we transport to. It’s a breath of fresh air to have this system. It’s been a long time coming, and took a lot of hard work by a lot of great people, and the outstanding support of the community.”
Bruce said they had been reliant on a system that had been band-aided repeatedly, and now they could pick up a radio no matter where they were at, and have communications.
“It will be generations down the line, but we will have emergency services that will not know what it’s like to not communicate on a radio, because they will have the updated system and working equipment. You can hear all the pages, and hear the initial fire/ground operations. Before we used to miss that, so we’d arrive on-scene kind of blind-sided, and we’d have to rely on the dispatcher to repeat the traffic. As I said before, the safety side of things alone is a million times better,” Bruce said.