Detroit fire department has alert system made of pop cans

Detroit fire department has alert system made of pop cans

Detroit is so broke that firefighters get emergency alerts through pop cans, coins, door hinges, pipes and doorbells.

And they make these gizmos themselves — one involving a pop can that gets tipped over by an incoming fax. The clink of the can means there’s an emergency. Then there’s the chain-reaction gadget: a fax hits a door hinge, which then tugs on a wire, which then sets off a doorbell.

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While it's sad that they had to resort to this, it's pretty cool how creative they got with some of their contraptions. DIYing at its finest...

Sounds like an Onion story and is sadly true. Wow.

We are own worst enemies in a way. I commend them for being creative and dealing with the situation, but man if we played dumb sometimes things might actually get fixed the right way.

Reminds me of a night where there were only 18 units in service. 18 units for 130sq miles. That was a rough night. Hopefully the restructuring and investment that has been getting pumped in will help. We have a bad rap in detroit but we are survivors and we get stuff done. The city is slowly comming back.

Wow. Just wow.

There's NO radio alerting system at all? What did they do before the pop cans?

Maybe they need to go back to standing radio watch?

DEmedic said:

There's NO radio alerting system at all? What did they do before the pop cans?

Click to expand...

Exactly? What were they using before the fax-soda can method? What changed to make it that bad?

They must have some sort of radio dispatch, right? If they're returning to quarters from a run and get another one, how else could they know?

Maybe this is in addition to the radio?

I imagine they have a normal radio system. I think this was more in reference to the alerting/paging component.

Kinda like soup cans and string. Feel for the guys

In the documentary "Burn" the station they were at had bells. I'm wondering if this isn't *only* some of their stations.

Hopefully they can get this sorted out. I wonder how many calls have a horrible chute time or are blatantly missed because of this, especially with the volume they run.

It sounds like the bells are manually activated by the house watch firefighter, who's primary alert is a silent printer, hence the soda cans.

I assume radio dispatch is a secondary method.

omg, this is completely ridiculous, for multiple reasons.

1) assuming the article is accurate, the primary alert system is the fax machine, not the pop cans. Still absurd, but not as bad as the headline makes it sound.

2) Many fire stations (nationwide) have a "watch man", whose sole job is to monitor the radio for calls, answer the phones, answer the doorbell. and if they get a call, activate the warning devices and hop on the truck and go. Most places give this job to the junior man on the shift, but some will rotate it based on what position you are riding. So if the watch guy gets the fax, it's his job to wake everyone up and manually sound the alarm.

3) making the assumption that DFD dispatches units on a radio too (E1, E2, T1, respond for the fire at abc location), they could make the watch man or the officer pay attention to the radio and always be listening for his or her unit being called, and they need to manually wake up the rest of the crew.

4) I know of one city in NJ (albeit much smaller than Detroit, in an equally ****ty area) where they have 3 houses, and among those 3 houses they have 3-4 engines, 2 trucks, and a DC. dispatch has 3 tones that sound on the radio: one for a single company response, one for an engine and ladder, and one for a full response. Want to know how they know which unit is getting assigned? they have to listen to the radio, and if it's there assignment, the officer acknowledges the assignment, and they take the call.

5) there are 43 fire companies which operate out of 37 individual stations in the City of Detroit. If you would give each company it's own set of tones, to automatically activate when an alarm is received, you can have close to a 30 seconds just of alarm tones for a full assignment (3 Engines, 1 Ladder, 1 Squad, 1 Chief). Don't believe me? try listening to some dispatch tapes out of Maryland and Northern Virginia. It happens.

Don't get me wrong, Detroit is in a financial nightmare, the city is bankrupt, and the EMS system is in much worse shape than the FD. And I applaud the FD for being creative in setting up their own custom notification system. But if Detroit is so busy where they aren't getting sleep, maybe they should follow the lead of EMS and switch to 12 hour shifts instead of 24s, and expect to be awake and alert for all 12 hours of their shift?

I wonder if privatizing might solve a few problems.
Rural Metro could run the fire department and EMS. ...or just the fire and Paramedics Plus or AMR or Trans Care could run EMS.
Both could bill whatever State/federal grant didn't cover... with strict performance goals.

Its a shame that this could even happen. It's either an awful oversight, or even worse, they were told to make do.

In their defense, my SAR team is considering cans and strings for cave rescue comms...