By John Dobberstein, Editor
The cities of Broken Arrow and Coweta are investing in dispatch software intended to facilitate the mutual aid agreement between their fire departments.
In January the Broken Arrow City Council and Coweta City Council approved an auto-aid agreement between the Broken Arrow Fire Department and the Coweta Fire Department.
The agreement provided for Broken Arrow to give automatic aid to certain areas within the Coweta Fire Department’s response area.
Broken Arrow’s computer aided dispatch (CAD) vendor, CentralSquare, provides software called Unify, which permits the linking of Broken Arrow’s CAD system to Coweta’s CAD system.
This linkage will streamline information sharing between CAD systems, which should speed up responses from both agencies and reduce the chance for error during verbal exchanges, Broken Arrow officials said.
The addition of this software will allow Broken Arrow to link to other CAD systems from other participating agencies if similar automatic or mutual aid agreement opportunities presented themselves.
The city said Coweta has committed to funding their portion of the project to address the ongoing annual software subscription expense of $26,100 needed to carry the effort forward.
The $50,699 cost to Broken Arrow, authorized by the BACC to be paid, includes both implementation and subscription.
The two cities have jointly identified unincorporated areas that are served by each city’s respective fire department. Within the Coweta Fire Department’s response area there are various locations where a Broken Arrow Fire Department response unit may be closer than a Coweta response unit, and vice versa.
Fire departments in both cities have traditionally provided residents “the best response possible” utilizing existing available resources while also increasing the safety of all firefighters working on emergency scenes in the unincorporated areas, Moore says.
For life-threatening medical emergencies and all structure fires, each city had agreed to respond with the closest suppression unit, if available. But neither city was required to dispatch equipment or personnel to an incident that is more than 5 miles from its closest fire station.
Although Broken Arrow has fire stations close to the unincorporated areas in question, those residents are technically in the Coweta fire district.
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