EVERETT — Every morning before dawn, Rick Robinson checks the laptop that’s mounted inside his Everett Fire Department rig. The software on the laptop is supposed to show the current location of every city fire truck and ambulance.
A few months ago, it wasn’t working so well. Emergency rigs were missing from the screen.
The fire department in October launched New World Systems, emergency-dispatching software that is being used in nearly every police and fire vehicle in Snohomish County. The multimillion-dollar project is perhaps best known for its bumpy start, though leaders say they’ve made a lot of progress in the past nine months.
The software was to blame for the lengthy delay of backup crews to the June 4 riverfront warehouse fire.
One promise with New World was that the software would provide live, around-the-clock GPS tracking of emergency rigs. That was a big deal for firefighters, because it meant crews could be deployed based on their locations at any given moment.
The change turned out to be more complicated than expected. Every police and fire department must negotiate the use of tracking technology with labor unions. That’s because GPS data could come up in misconduct investigations involving public employees.
Everett bought its GPS trackers a few years ago. That was before advances were made in the technology that provides a cellular data connection, city spokeswoman Meghan Pembroke said. Those older trackers cost $40 apiece.
After months of research, the city recently decided to buy two dozen new GPS trackers to support New World mapping. The new trackers cost about $1,000 each and combine GPS units with rooftop cellular antennas. The city was working on placing the order this week, after conducting a test drive with an ambulance.
The new equipment should provide “markedly better performance,” Pembroke said.
However, GPS hasn’t been the sole source of technical woes.
After New World launched, the software on the laptops mounted in city fire trucks and ambulances kept freezing and crashing. It happened enough for department leaders to worry the problems might delay life-saving care.
Robinson, now an assistant fire chief, also has helped oversee the adaptation of New World for city firefighters since 2009.
On Dec. 10, Robinson wrote in an email that he was asking crews to be patient, but that software slow-downs were “trouble on trouble,” according to public records recently obtained by The Daily Herald.
On April 27, he wrote the dispatch center, “this software crash today injects more uncertainty when we’re working very hard to inject confidence.”
The fire department keeps a spreadsheet tracking complaints about New World. So do the county’s 911 dispatch centers, which hold the contract with the vendor. Part of Robinson’s job is sorting out the human errors and hardware problems in Everett from the software bugs.
The city in June concluded that the wireless Internet connection on fire rigs was not powerful enough for New World. The previous county-wide computer dispatch system was based on decades-old technology. It was not much more advanced than a fax machine. It wasn’t capable of live mapping and GPS tracking.
In response to the problems, Everett added Wi-Fi, or wireless Internet, in every fire station earlier this month. The fire stations are constructed of concrete and steel. Some of the problems with connectivity, freezing and crashing happened because the crews’ computers couldn’t connect to New World from inside the fire stations, Robinson said in a recent interview. It also meant that firefighters couldn’t log on in the mornings, before their first emergency call, which likely was why those rigs were missing from the New World tracking screen when Robinson checked at the start of each day.
“We know where our problems are, and that’s where we’re focused on,” Robinson said.
While New World has been controversial in many ways, other fire departments in the county have not reported as many complaints from crews as Everett. City leaders say that’s in part due to Everett’s high volume of emergency calls and the fact that Everett is considered a “saturation zone” where a large number of public and private users are putting demands on cellular networks. That saturation has followed the proliferation of smart phones.
If fire trucks are beyond the reach of city Wi-Fi, they are just like any other cellular user. They don’t get priority Internet access over people using Facebook or checking their email.
After the June warehouse fire, Mayor Ray Stephanson asked the makers of New World to meet with him in private and talk. That’s supposed to happen before summer is out.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.
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