Agenda - 01-16-1999- 3 - Laserfiche WebLink

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information. Emergency Management will soon be integrating the Geographical Information System into its E911 system, Having information available about water sources, special hazards, and utility coverage areas gives Emergency Management and the fire departments the ability to act quickly and with greater efficiency to more situations. The system could pinpoint the closest water source. It could speed up the time to dispatching utility workers to a scene. It allows precise directions to be given to responding parties. Another advantage to the GIS/E911 *integration is the ability for the Land Records office to print current maps of the district out for the fire departments. Emergency Management has defined a grid system. Once the process is completed, firefighters dispatched to a scene will have grid books that have up to the date maps including any new subdivisions. Once the dispatcher calls out the grid, the firefighters can look at the map in the grid book and see where the location is, and also see other resources (such as water) and where they are in relation to the scene. One of our firefighters personally purchased the software program (about $ 1200) to gather the information about our district. This is information that-requires close personal knowledge about an area that only firefighters have. The time and effort to gather this information is volunteered by the team we have working on the insurance upgrade. The Land Records office has been most enthusiastic about placing the data into the GIS database. They are willing to print the maps, but correctly acknowledge that to do so for the entire county on biannual basis does require some time. We asked Emergency Management if they could purchase one copy of this program that could be used by volunteers who.would gather this critical information. The cost of the program ($ 1200) plus the cost of a second program that can measure distances on a map need for insurance rating purposes (an additional $ 1200) was apparently enough that no action was taken, so one of our firefighters purchased the program. We would ask that the commissioners realize both the value of this information and the value of the volunteered time to obtain it. It would be nice if there was coordinated effort between the Fire Departments, Emergency Management, and the Land Records office to work on this problem and allocate the resources to solve it. It must be cheaper for the county if the labor is - volunteer and one of the above agencies incur the one time expense of the software then it is to hire the people, who would not have the unique local knowledge, to gather the data. Again we see a'great value for the county financially and a great benefit to the citizens operationally. - Our department, like many rural departments, is seeing more and more of its members placed in full time positions with municipal departments in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Training for many of the departments used the Chapel Hill facilities. We also used an area Chapel Hill has for the annual testing, of our pumpers. Chapel Hill is requesting that we pay for the use of these facilities. It would be nice if the commissioners could facilitate a solution for these common resources. This could be done by working with Chapel Hill, or by having Orange County Emergency Management work towards a county testing and training