[Dispatch] Email Alerts

[Brooks, William]

As you all are aware we hesitate to ever crack the door on new things since it tends to create a lot of other support issues. Over the last year we have had several inquiries from ESDs wanting to use email alerting for notifications. It appears that the word spreads fast and I have had two requests recently to support this.

I want to set some ground rules before this grows legs and gets out of control. I am willing to support one or two email addresses at the most tied to group paging. My preference would be this is a single email address that the each ESD then controls who is a member of the group. Dispatches role would be nothing more than to deliver the call to the server for dissemination through our automated CAD notification process.

I am unwilling to use emails tied to units since this gets very complicated and is easily lost when vehicle exchanges are performed or units log in improperly. We already have some significant problems with this since we don't have a list of everyone's pagers numbers and groups tied to each unit. This is likely something I am going to develop in the future but maintenance of everything is always a problem for us.

AFD cannot guarantee the reliability of email alerting and we discourage attempting to get all of your alerts based on a single device. Beyond verifying that the page was sent by CAD we don't have the staffing to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot multiple failures so if this becomes too onerous I reserve the right to quit supporting email alerting. Keeping this process simple is important for us to be able to take on this extra task.

Having said all of that and sounding like the mean guy I have to say I think this does offer some benefits to you and it seems to work well most of the time. If you are interested you may send me an email with the address you would like incidents sent to. I know two of the ESDs possibly more are using alert.active911.com for service.

Captain William B. Brooks
Austin Fire Department - 911/Communications
4201 Ed Bluestein Blvd.
Austin, TX 78721
Phone: (512) 974-0407

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