They’d have that information — and a lot more — thanks to the creation and exhaustive updating of pre-fire plans that they now can access through on-board computers in the fire trucks.
The Southern Pines and Pinehurst fire departments have installed laptop computers in the passenger sides of their fire trucks. From these computers they can access a wealth of information, including pre-fire plans for area businesses.
The pre-fire plans consist of a building floor plan and a readout of crucial information including the material of which the building is constructed (whether it is flammable or not), the material of the roof, the building size, the utilities cut-off points and, yes, even the amount of water that would be needed to put out a blaze.
“It’s technology,” said Southern Pines Fire Chief Rick Baker, “and I think we’re taking advantage of it.”
The applications of this technology will in essence allow young firefighters to have access to the knowledge of veteran firefighters, Baker said.
Southern Pines is small enough, he said, that the veteran firefighters know many of the buildings and they can recall pertinent information while on a call.
“They know things that are critical to fire suppression, like does the building have a basement or has the roof been redone,” he said. Thanks to the inboard computer technology, all the firefighters would then have access to such critical information.
“It won’t give them that experience factor,” Baker explained, “but it will make available to them vital information that can assist in memory recall.”
Southern Pines firefighters have been going from building to building during the last six months or so, taking measurements and drawing floor plans. While they’re at it, they ask business owners questions like, “Do you have natural gas?” and “Where can you turn off the power?”
The answers get plugged into the pre-fire plan, then into the station computer, then into the trucks’ laptops.
All that information allows the fire department to use a formula to determine the total water it would need to extinguish a fire. That’s how they get a number like 2,250 gpm for The Pilot’s building on West Pennsylvania Avenue.
Baker said members of the department used to have to make all the calculations by hand in notebooks. Before having these laptops, firefighters had to carry around two large carrying cases full of the notebooks. Not having to deal with those notebooks makes fire response faster.
“It’s much easier than that tremendous amount of notebooks,” Baker said.
The laptops are mounted to the dashboard on the front passenger side of the trucks. They cost between $3,000 and 4,000. The laptops are more durable than a normal laptop that you could buy in a store. That’s because vibration from the engine could ruin a normal computer, Baker said.
Right now all the information is stored on the laptops and on a database back at the station. When the firefighters want to update the information, they have to physically take the laptop and connect it to the station computer and then add the new information.
But in the future, the laptops in the trucks may be able use radio waves to access the information on the database.
Many Moore County law-enforcement departments are using that technology now. Baker said the fire department would be ready if and when the technology becomes available.
“We’re getting the information prepared for if we ever get access to that,” he said.
The Southern Pines and Pinehurst Fire Departments are still in the process of loading and verifying the accuracy of the information. The Circle V Fire Department and Aberdeen Fire Department are both in the process of installing some form of this system. Aberdeen firefighters said that they would buy these laptops as soon as they can find some budgetary leeway.
None of them would completely abandon the old notebook system.
“We will always have one level of hard copy,” Baker said. “Our business deals with things at the worst time. Emergencies occur all the time and in those situations you can lose a computer.”
Considering what would happen if the computers did crash is all part of worst case scenario planning, Baker said.
“Right now, it’s the best we have,” he said, “until it crashes.”
