House Fire Destroys Inverness Home On Carnoustie Ln Near Palatine Rd, As Northwest Central Dispatch 911 Mutual Aid Dispatch Fails

Palatine Rural firefighter/paramedics responded and Inverness police responded about 7:15 PM Tuesday to a report of a house fire at 14 Carnoustie Lane Inverness, IL. Firefighters reported a well-involved house fire and called for mutual aid at about 4:55 p.m. Northwest Central Dispatch System 9-1-1 center, which dispatches fire and police for Inverness and orders mutual aid companies as division headquarters for MABAS Division 1 had a communication failure involving either a problem with their alerting tones or their radio. They likely had to scramble to request mutual sequentially by telephone. Apparently they were not able to use their standard equipment until 5:23 p.m. when they re-attempted to alert mutual aid fire department.

There is no official word that the dispatch failure was a factor in the house fire raging out of control, but it certainly did not help for efficient firefighting at the incident. There is an old adage that fires double in size every minute or so. Mutual aid companies are also very important on hot days when fire departments need to rotate their crews to prevent heat exhaustion or even death from heat illnesses.

Tenders were called to the scene, so the neighborhood likely does not have fire hydrants or has a shortage of fire hydrants in the area -- a situation that already puts a home in peril. A delay in the response of mutual aid companies very likely delayed the extinguishment of the fire.

Nothwest Central Dispatch has been plagued with radio problems and computer aided dispatch problems since they switch to a new computer aided dispatch system in April 2012. The system was under scrutiny when Palatine Fire Department had a delay of fifteen minute for a heart attack medical call because of a failure of the computer aided dispatch system. The system wasn't dispatching calls. Since then other delays were discovered.

Northwest Central Dispatch System dispatchers voted no confidence in their management because of the failures in the system.

The Executive Committee responded to the dispatcher saying they had confidence in the management of Northwest Central Disptach.

On June 5, 2013 Northwest Central Dispatch System switched to an encrypted radio system using TDMA technology resulting in the prohibition of police and fire scanners monitoring of their public safety channels. The technology prevents citizens from overseeing the performance of their police and firefighters.

The mutual aid frequency dispatch is not part of the new secret radio technology that Northwest Central Dispatch System uses. The MABAS (MUTUAL AID BOX ALARM SYSTEM) uses an IFERN (Intersystem Emergency Radio Network) frequency that all fire departments in the area share, and a frequency that can be monitored by the news media and citizens.

It is unknown if Northwest Central Dispatch System also had trouble with their local secret radio frequency since it cannot be monitored by the media or the public.

Read complete article on Arlingtoncardinal.com ...

http://www.arlingtoncardinal.com/?s=House+Fire+Destroys+Inverness+Home+On+Carnoustie+Ln+Near+Palatine+Rd,+As+Northwest+Central+Dispatch+911+Mutual+Aid+Dispatch+Fails


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