AFD Communications Center
The Anchorage Fire Department (AFD) Communications Center is located next door to Fire Station 12. Sixteen positions are allotted for the communications center: 12 dispatcher positions and 4 lead dispatcher positions under the direction of the Fire Communications Officer. Shifts are 12 hours in length, ranging from 0700 to 1900 hrs, 1100 to 2300 hrs or 1900 to 0700 hrs. Minimum staffing is 3 personnel, two taking phone calls and one dispatching. The center handles approximately 36,000 calls a year. AFD is responsible for an area of about 1956 square miles and includes a population of approximately 272,000 people.
Communication Center duties include answering emergency 9-1-1 phone calls, providing instructions for callers to perform CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, control bleeding, maintain airways, assist in child birth etc. All personnel are required to be CPR certified, with recertification occurring every 2 years through the AFD Training Center. Communications center personnel are also Emergency Medical Dispatch certified. Initial certification requires a 24 hour class with recertification occurring every 2 years through a written test and completion of 24 hrs of Continuing Education. This is accomplished through Medical Priority Consultants in Salt Lake City.
Calls are also received and handled that are non-emergency in nature, such as those from fire alarm system technicians when they take a system offline for testing and place the systems back online. Additionally, AFD assists with calls from other agencies such as Anchorage Police Dept. (APD), Alaska State Troopers (AST), University of Alaska Police Department, and Anchorage International Airport Police.
On June 21, 2001 AFD switched from a manual dispatch system to VisiCAD™ Cad system. In conjunction with the CAD system a Medical Priority ProQA™ computer version is used. The change from the manual system to the CAD system has reduced the amount of time it takes to dispatch a call to under a minute.
The dispatch center is also set up with Motorola Gold Elite radio consoles, Westnet station alerting and Locution voice announcement for the stations. The 911 phone system is currently undergoing upgrades and will have a new system online in the near future. AFD is exploring adding Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) and Status heads to our response vehicles. They would be linked to CAD to allow for more accurate dispatches and help reduce radio traffic.
The AFD communications center is responsible for dispatching AFD Fire & EMS units in the Anchorage and Eagle River areas. The Southfork Volunteer Fire Dept (SFVFD) in the Hiland Road area, the Chugiak Volunteer Fire Dept (CVFD) in Chugiak and Peters Creek areas and the Girdwood Volunteer Fire Dept (GVFD) in the Girdwood/Alyeska areas are also dispatched from the center. AFD also dispatches Transcare and Guardian Flight, private ambulance companies that cover patient transports from multiple facilities in Anchorage to local hospitals. They handle a majority of the medivac patient transports that come in from around the state destined for local hospitals.
AFD Dispatch also monitors the main fire radio channel plus 5 Tactical channels, the Chugiak and Girdwood VFD channels, State EMS channel, and the Alaska Command Control channel.
After business hours, Municipal agencies that have problems with their facilities such as electrical or plumbing contact dispatch. These issues are then referred to the on-call Facility Maintenance Supervisor to report the problem. When the Street Maintenance Control Desk is not manned, their phones are forwarded to AFD Dispatch to take complaints ranging from plugged storm drains, roads flooding, streets needing sand and/or plowing to trees down across the road.
If there is a major incident of long duration in the field such as wildland fires or joint exercises involving multiple agencies, AFD Dispatch has the ability to set up a mobile dispatch center in the field with the use of the command bus. This will allow the Communications Center to go back to normal operations and concentrate on the daily call volume.