Orange County Fire Rescue’s

new 911 call-out system uses GPS, sending vehicles closest to an incident out to calls.

The Orange County Fire Rescue Department is trying to reduce response times with a new GPS technology that uses the locations of its vehicles to dispatch firefighters.

The department started using Automatic Vehicle Location for dispatch in June to make its operations more efficient, Fire Rescue Chief Otto Drozd III said.

“As our vehicles are in transit and a call comes in, we match the resource to the need,” he told Orange County commissioners during a meeting last month. “That’s going to make us much more efficient in our response times, but ultimately, it’s going to save lives within the community because we can get there much, much quicker.”

Drozd said that before the technology was introduced, firefighters were sent to scenes based on the location of each station. Now, if a fire department vehicle is in transit outside of its station’s region, it can be sent to a scene based on where it is in relation to the incident.

“We’re constantly pinging the location of the [vehicles], and as a call comes in, when there’s a need and we have a unit close by, that unit will go to that call,” he said.

The technology doesn’t just use actual distance to determine which unit to send to an emergency — it considers the roads and speed limits in an area to determine who can get to the area faster.

The travel times for Fire Rescue units have been steadily increasing each year because of growth in the county and increased demand, Drozd said. In 2010, travel time was at about 7 minutes, 15 seconds, according to the presentation he gave commissioners. In 2017, unit travel time is about 9 minutes, 30 seconds.

“Everything that we do is predicated on shortening the time between when the caller dials 911 to when we get to the scene,” Drozd said.

He said it’s still too early to tell the impact the technology has had on response times so far, but he expects to see a change, “especially on those extreme emergencies where not only minutes but seconds count.”