South Wales Fire and Rescue Service
Life-saving information
South Wales Fire & Rescue Service is now able to provide
firefighters with wireless access to potentially life-saving
information, which ranges from building plans to car designs
and chemical properties.
South Wales is one of the largest Fire and
Rescue Services in the UK. Its 50 fire stations are staffed
by around 1,400 whole-time and retained firefighters, who respond
to more than 60,000 emergency calls every year.
These calls can vary from serious road traffic accidents to
chemical spillages and potentially fatal house fires. The initial
information required at different incidents can vary considerably,
so it is essential that the attending fire crews are able to
source additional data while responding to individual call-outs.
Although much of this data is available via Brigade Control,
the service’s intranet and hard copy documents, it is
not always practical for firefighters to gather information
from these sources while travelling to or attending an incident.
As Chris Williams, IT manager for South Wales Fire & Rescue
Service, explains: “Firefighters work in highly stressful
and dangerous situations. They are not in a position that they
can take notes when talking to Control, so that means they
have to rely on their memory, which can be difficult when sourcing
complex data about car designs or chemicals.”
Fire services across the UK have started to adopt Vehicle
Mounted Data Systems (VMDS). These feature ruggedised touch-sensitive
monitors and enable firefighters to access a wealth of information,
from road maps to building designs, from their cabs. South
Wales Fire & Rescue Service chose to take the system one
step further, as Williams explains: “We decided it would
be more efficient and cost-effective to use our intranet as
the data feed for the system. This means we have just one data
set to maintain and manage.”
This meant that South Wales not only had to deploy a new server
back-end to support the system, but also provide the VDMS with
wireless connectivity.
Making the wireless connection
One key area of the project where South Wales needed assistance was implementing
the wireless connectivity for the in-cab systems. |
