LAWTON – Comanche County’s 20 volunteer fire departments and the City of Lawton are “talking” to each other again after an interruption of seven months.
The City of Lawton manages the dispatching duties for all volunteer fire departments (VFDs) in Comanche County. When Lawton switched to a Tyler Technologies Computer Aided Dispatch system last December, the volunteer departments lost their secondary means of communication with dispatch, Comanche County Public Information Officer Amy McGlone Hawkins related.
Since the voluntary fire departments are in rural areas “they need to have two ways of communicating with dispatch,” she said.
Their primary means of communication is with radios and pagers. “However, when volunteer firefighters are out of range of their radios, they use a backup paging system called ‘IamResponding’ or some equivalent e-dispatch system,” McGlone Hawkins said. “These work through apps on their mobile phones.”
However, Lawton IT refused to allow the volunteer fire departments to use these apps “for fear of security issues,” she said.
“Our company recognizes and respects the important role volunteer firefighters and paramedics play in protecting our communities,” Tyler Technologies said in a statement released Tuesday by the City of Lawton.
“Working with the City of Lawton Information Technology Department and Microsoft, Tyler resolved a way of relaying information from our Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system to the IamResponding application in a secure manner on Friday, June 25.”
IamResponding “went down last December and was down throughout this process,” Brandon Wagner, deputy chief of the Wichita Mountains Estates VFD, told the Ledger on Tuesday. “I’m happy it’s working again.”
“As of yesterday, it was working correctly,” a Sterling VFD spokesman who chose to remain anonymous told the Ledger.
The Wichita Mountains Estates department initially encountered delays in responding to some calls, but improvised and worked through the problem, Wagner said.
Because of the snafu, “We had to use our budget and some of us paid $380 out of our pockets for pagers,” he said. The volunteer firefighters also created a Facebook group via which messages and alerts could be sent to members. “It was a pain,” said Wag- ner, whose full-time job is with the Fort Sill Fire Department.
Many of the Sterling VFD firefighters have radios, the anonymous spokesman said, “and we had to set up a way to send the tones from IamResponding to our phones.” IamResponding and equivalent applications can produce warning tones that are loud enough to awaken sleeping firefighters.
In addition, while the system was down the Sterling firefighters had to use Google Maps to find some rural addresses. “We had to go through three or four more steps than we usually do,” the spokesman 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.”
After Lawton’s upgrade to the Tyler CAD system, Comanche County Emergency Management Director Michael Merritt worked with the city’s IT department “to get back up and running,” he told the Comanche County Board of Commissioners.
The central issue is that Lawton’s CAD system requires messages to be encrypted, to prevent hacking, the county commissioners were told. “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.
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 IamResponding, McGlone Hawkins said. The $71,000 investment would re-establish the VFDs’ secondary link with the City of Lawton.
But during a meeting 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,” Hawkins said.
As an example, Crew Force does not produce warning tones loud enough to awaken sleeping volunteer firefighters in the middle of the night, McGlone Hawkins told the county commissioners in April.
“We feel like we’re being held hostage,” RedElk said at the time.
“They tried to force this more expensive system down our throats,” Wagner said.
“Fifty-six thousand dollars is outrageous,” said Tom Myers, chief of the Pecan Creek Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s an interface problem.”
Tyler Technologies “appreciates the patience, diligence and cooperative spirit of all parties working together to find a solution to this matter,” the company said in its statement Tuesday.