Airwave Innovation Helps Fire & Rescue Services

11 January 2010, 8:03pm

Fire & rescue services are now able to deploy and manage their resources more effectively thanks to innovative technology developed in partnership with SEED Software now supplied and supported by Airwave, the UK's leading public safety communications provider.

FireCall is a secure and resilient application which provides fire fighters with sophisticated mapping and location information, enabling accurate and pre-emptive risk assessment, through the provision of data. This includes hydrant location, chemical data and autodata, which provides information about vehicles to assist during response to road traffic collisions. In addition, it allows the control room to monitor the whereabouts and status of fire appliances which optimises the efficient deployment of critical life saving resources and significantly improves the command & control of the incident.

The solution supports continuous service improvement as vehicle movements are logged for analysis and information can be shared more widely within a fire and rescue service.

Malcolm Eastwood, Airwave's fire and civil resilience advisor, said: "FireCall replaces existing voice and paper-based processes and supports the drive towards greater efficiency, effectiveness and safety for fire and rescue services. It is designed to help fire and rescue services identify the most appropriate resources to deploy to an incident, as well as enabling fire fighters to access up-to-date information, thereby contributing towards improved outcomes and, of course, safety."

FireCall works over hand-held PDA (Personal Digital Assistant devices) as well as in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals (MDT) devices and, because it uses Airwave's nationwide TETRA network, it is reliable, secure and highly resilient.

Geo: International