It could be the sudden discovery of a child trapped on the top floor of a burning building. It could be a multi-car collision just over the city line, close to a fire station but outside its jurisdiction.
These are the critical details of everyday tragedies that, if not shared across multiple responding agencies, can lead to miscommunication, unnecessary delays and precious wasted time.
“The one thing you hear about any major incident is that there was a communication problem,” said Paul Smith, executive director of Centennial-based Metropolitan Area Communications Center, or MetCom.
Under Smith’s leadership, five fire agencies in the Denver metro area — Arvada, Evergreen, Littleton, South Metro and West Metro — are making strides to consolidate their emergency dispatch centers and place the management of all 911 calls for fire and medical help under a single computer-aided dispatch system (CAD).
Covering 23 cities, 1 million residents and nearly 1,200 square miles across three counties, the Jefferson-Arapahoe Consolidated CAD (JACC) will be one of the largest efforts of its kind in the state. Parts of Douglas County also will be covered.
When it goes live at the beginning of October, JACC will process more than 78,000 fire and emergency calls a year, Smith said.
“It’s a huge way to do data interoperability,” he said. “With information being shared by everyone, situations where someone is trapped in a bedroom would be seen by all the agencies.”
Not only will the dispatcher know where all responding units are at any given time, that information also will appear on the mobile data terminals inside firetrucks racing to a scene. Littleton will get the same mapping technology as South Metro, while Evergreen will have access to the same firefighting plans as West Metro.
“When they go on an attack, it’s a more unified approach,” Smith said.
Evergreen Fire and Rescue Chief Mike Weege said JACC will allow a commander on scene to focus on the specific firefighting effort rather than having to worry about whether the right units are on the way.
“As an incident commander, you’re concentrating on the initial attack and you want to avoid taking the time to explain what you need,” Weege said. “With the shared CAD, the dispatcher will know what (types of units) to call for backup.”
Littleton Fire Chief Christopher Armstrong said the consolidation effort promises to reduce redundancies and fill in holes on a call.
“Really what it’s doing is taking a bunch of individual pockets and providing us a regional overview of our resources,” he said.
The Arapahoe County and Jefferson County 911 authority boards are funding the $1.3 million project, which is designed by San Diego-based TriTech Software Systems.
TriTech is the company behind Boulder County’s consolidated CAD system, which was rolled out in late 2012 for fire and police services.
Robert Sullenberger, division chief with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, said the new system far exceeds in performance what the county used before. It handled 310,000 calls in 2013, he said.
The true test of the system came in September, when historic flooding prompted a wave of 911 calls into the county’s four dispatch centers.
“I was very impressed with it when the floods hit up here,” Sullenberger said. “The system held up — there was no downtime whatsoever. And that was one heck of a stress test we put on that software.”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com
