Flint’s been burning up for almost a month now, so I dusted off my Bearcat scanner to keep track of fire calls. So, once trucks are sent to a location, the dispatcher will call out a ten minute marker. I tried googling it but didn’t find anything relevant. Any body know what they are for? Thanks.
Air supply management.
It’s not fire service, but when working EMS, our in-house dispatch would notify us every 10 minutes we were on scene. The reasoning behind that was that our goal was to be on the way to the hospital or back to base in under 20 minutes, and we were to triage the patient in the first 10 minutes.
There were times this would be unlikely, such as a car wreak, when we had to wait for fire to cut the patient out, or a suicide stand off, where we would have to wait for law enforcement to secure the scene, or we would negotiate with the patient. If the EMS crew was busy with patient care, and couldn’t talk to dispatch, we could just double click our radio mic’s and update dispatch when we could.
I can see a fire department that runs EMS calls would implement the same type of system. On scene, it become difficult to keep track of the time while attending to the patient, deciding medical treatment, or just scene management. Someone who has very little to do, except monitor time and the unit’s status is very helpful. It could be, this department started the 1o minute notification for EMS calls, but it eventually became every call.
It could be the dispatch command didn’t want dispatch falling asleep while a truck was out late at night, so the 10 minute warning is to keep them occupied. It could also help a supervisor know how long a truck has been out and they could decide to head over to that scene.
The volunteer department I was on did not have the 10 minute postings, but then, we also didn’t have an in-house dispatch. The updates never bothered me, and were useful to help keep track of scene time.
To expand on IAmNotSpartacus’ response…
The air cylinders firefighters use have a minimum nominal 30 minute capacity (although 45- and 60- minute bottles are becoming more widely used). Although ii says 30 minutes on the side of the bottle, you’re lucky if it lasts 18-22 minutes while working. If you have 20 minutes of air, and it takes you five minutes to get where you are, it’s going to take you five minutes to get out, giving you ten minutes of work time; and that doesn’t even leave you a reserve of air for when something goes awry inside - you should be out long before you drain your bottle dry. That ten minutes goes by very, very fast, particularly when you’re not paying attention to your air supply. The solution in some departments is to have the dispatcher make an announcement every ten minutes, giving everyone a reality check as to where they are and what they’re doing.
Another benefit to the ten minute announcements is to give a reality check to the incident commander. If you have your personnel inside a building for 20 minutes (two announcements) and you’re not seeing progress made on the fire, it’s time to back out and try something else. In those twenty minutes, the building has been made a heck of a lot weaker than it was when you first got there, it’s time to not be inside anymore. Time passes very quickly standing in the street coordinating a fire attack, having a reminder every so often of what time has passed is a good thing.
My fire service does not use 10 minute markers; in fact, I’ve never heard of them in the context you’ve described.
When I run rescue (separate department), we will get a welfare check 15 minutes after reporting on-scene. If we don’t respond, the sheriff’s department gets dispatched.
Also, because we have long-haul transport times, internal to the ambulance, the driver will give a notice to the patient attendant that the unit has passed below 10 minutes to the ER to allow for reporting to the hospital of inbound traffic.
Not very surprising, I am guessing this is a smaller department perhaps with vollies in addition to paid responders?
Fire department is rural and 100% volunteer.
Great answers, thanks very much for taking the time to respond.
When I googled I saw lots of references to 10 min intervals, mostly in ref. to EMS situations, but nothing in ref. to the dispatchers and markers.