LAWTON – Comanche County’s 20 volunteer fire departments and the City of Lawton aren’t “talking” to each other.
When Lawton switched to a Tyler Technologies Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system last December, the volunteer departments lost their secondary means of communication with dispatch, Comanche County Public Information Officer Amy McGlone related.
Since the voluntary fire departments are in rural areas “they need to have two ways of communicating with dispatch,” Ms. McGlone said.
Their primary means of communication is with radios and pagers. “However, when volunteer firefighters are out of range of their radios, they used a backup paging system called ‘I Am Responding’ or some equivalent e-dispatch system,” McGlone said. “These worked through apps on their mobile ’phones.”
However, Lawton IT now refuses to allow the volunteer fire departments (VFDs) to use these apps “for fear of security issues,” McGlone said.
Steve RedElk, assistant chief of the Cache Volunteer Fire Department, said the radios of the volunteer departments “are limited by location, geography and weather.”
Since Lawton’s upgrade to the Tyler CAD system, “We have been working with the city’s IT department to get back up and running,” Comanche County Emergency Management Director Michael Merritt told the Board of County Commissioners on Monday.
Lawton’s IT department quoted a price of $56,000 for use of the Tyler CAD plus $15,000 for Crew Force, an app by Tyler that is similar to I Am Responding, McGlone said. The $71,000 investment would re-establish the VFDs’ secondary link with the City of Lawton.
But during a meeting last week with 19 of the 20 chiefs of the county’s volunteer fire departments, “They decided unanimously to discontinue any efforts in regard to this,” Merritt said. “They believe it would be a waste of money for the county, because Crew Force doesn’t provide capabilities they need,” McGlone said.
I Am Responding and equivalent applications can produce warning tones that are loud enough to awaken sleeping volunteer firefighters in the middle of the night, the county commissioners were told. “Crew Force does not have that capability,” McGlone said.
“We feel like we’re being held hostage,” RedElk said.
“Fifty-six thousand dollars is outrageous,” said Tom Myers, chief of the Pecan Creek Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s an interface problem.”
“There’s a concern that messages which are not encrypted could allow somebody to hack their system through ‘the back door’,” Western District County Commissioner Alvin Cargill said.
“I can understand them being gunshy,” Central District County Commissioner Johnny Owens said. City of Lawton servers were compromised in 2017, he recalled; the breach resulted in the loss of data and recovery required hundreds of manhours. In addition, the Comanche County website was hacked and defaced on Oct. 23, 2020.
The county commissioners need to meet with Lawton City Manager Michael Cleghorn “and decide on a path forward,” Cargill said.
Read the City of Lawton's response to this issue at this link: www.southwestledger.news/news/statement-city-lawton-about-its-dispatching-system