By Larry Sandler
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MILWAUKEE — For more than a year, a $400,000 system that pinpoints Fire Department vehicles on Milwaukee streets has been foiled by the streets themselves.
The department’s global positioning system units repeatedly have been knocked out of service when firetrucks and paramedic vans struck potholes while racing through the city’s deteriorating streets, Fire Chief Doug Holton said.
Fire Department personnel have spent more than 300 hours fixing the electronic equipment, and only recently reached the point where nearly all of the GPS units in front-line vehicles fully were operational, department officials said.
The department’s satellite-based automatic vehicle locator system was part of a $4.2 million computer-aided dispatching system that went live in late April 2004.
When it’s working properly, the system produces an electronic street map that shows dispatchers the location of every vehicle. Icons identify the unit by number — L10 for Ladder Truck 10, for example — and can show its speed and course. The map is updated every minute to show how vehicle locations have changed.
That worked fine for about three years, until a computer server crashed and took down the GPS functions. When the Journal Sentinel first reported on the GPS problems in May 2008, the system had been out of service for a year. At that time, Holton said his goal was to have the system fully operational by August 2008, when motorcyclists would jam city streets for the 105th anniversary of Harley-Davidson Inc.
The $5,000 server was back up that summer, before the Harley rally, said Capt. John Pederson, a technical services officer. But then department officials discovered that many of the GPS units in the vehicles were malfunctioning, Holton said. They started inspecting and repairing the units, one by one, he said.
Some of the units were damaged by firefighters who piled other equipment on top of them, Pederson said. But in most cases, road damage was the culprit, said Holton and Battalion Chief Sean Slowey, commander of the technical services section.
“If you’re going 30 mph and you hit a pothole, that does a lot of damage,” Holton said.
Slowey added, “When you ride in some of our older units that don’t have new suspension systems, it’s a very brutal ride.”
Seasonal damage
Winter weather and road salt also take a toll on the vehicles’ electrical systems, because factory-installed wiring is on the undercarriages of pumper engines and ladder trucks, unlike with ordinary cars, Holton said.
After months of work, GPS units are working in 65 of 69 front-line vehicles, representing 94% of the pumper engines, ladder trucks, medical units and battalion chiefs’ cars in active service, Pederson said. Repairs are under way on the other four, he said.
The systems also are installed in 33 other Fire Department vehicles, including backup vehicles and specialized units, Pederson said. Of those, 20 are working, for a total of 85 of 102 GPS units, or 83%. Some units will be repaired when nine support vehicles are replaced, including the department’s mobile command post, he said.
When GPS units aren’t functioning, dispatchers use an older system that provides more general position information, or they revert to the tried-and-true method of calling firefighters and paramedics to ask where they are, Slowey said.
Fire Department officials are working on an upgrade that will let crews use their laptops to see the position of all vehicles responding to an incident, Pederson said.
When Ald. Nik Kovac asked Holton about GPS at a recent budget hearing before a Common Council committee, Holton incorrectly told him the Fire Department did not have GPS capability. The chief said last week that he thought Kovac was asking whether the department had a more advanced system that shows the location of every unit continuously, instead of at one-minute intervals.
Kovac said he was glad to hear the system was functioning. He said that kind of technology is particularly important in light of the firefighter staffing cuts that the council approved Friday in the 2010 city budget. With fewer companies in service each day and fewer firefighters on ladder trucks, the department needs up-to-the-minute information to make the best use of its crews, Kovac said.
“Personnel are very expensive,” Kovac said. “If there’s a way to use technology to make personnel more efficient, then we need to do that.”
Copyright 2009 Journal Sentinel Inc.