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?
