Wheaton Coordinates Firefighting Resources with Three Communities

Nearly two years of work is paying off for an alliance of local fire departments. The Wheaton Fire Department has joined the Winfield, West Chicago and Carol Stream Fire Protection Districts in creating the West Suburban Fire/Rescue Alliance, a formal effort to create better cooperation among the fire departments. This month, the Alliance launched a dispatch system that better coordinates emergency services and enhances the departments’ ability to share resources.

The switch to a unified dispatch system required a great deal of coordination from the departments, as the departments first had to develop common response procedures to incidents and common training. It also required DU-COMM (the dispatch agency) to completely reprogram the Computer Aided Dispatch system for these departments.

Although all four communities use DU-COMM as their dispatching service, each community previously had its own set of procedures for how it responded to emergencies within and outside of its community. With the new automated system, when DU-COMM receives a call for an emergency anywhere within the four communities, it automatically dispatches the closest available fire station to the emergency. During high call demand situations, the residents within these four communities may have fire personnel from a different community show up to assist them in an emergency, as the system automatically draws from shared resources across the departments.

The four departments have created standard response procedures, standard training procedures, standard communication procedures, and standard operating guidelines. These efforts will result in all four of the departments responding to emergencies in a common manner, with common operational procedures and common training methods.

“I’m pleased to see this system put into place because I believe the City will see better service on a consistent basis from the West Suburban Fire/Rescue Alliance based on functional cooperation,” said Wheaton Fire Chief Gregory Berk.

Chief Berk stressed that the alliance is not a consolidation of the fire departments – it’s all about functional cooperation. It allows these fire departments to share common resources, provide more cost-effective services to residents in all of the jurisdictions and increase safety for response personnel by using common procedures. Rather than being limited to the resources of Wheaton’s three fire stations, now the Wheaton Fire Department can automatically draw from the resources of 10 fire stations within the alliance, and the alliance is considering expansion. A number of other communities have expressed interest in joining the West Suburban Fire/Rescue Alliance, which would broaden this base of available resources even further.

“As time moves on, the Alliance Departments will begin working on other initiatives such as cooperative purchasing activities and opportunities for resource sharing,” Chief Berk added. “In this time of tight budgets, the move toward cooperative services just makes sense. To be able provide more efficient, cost-effective services is a great benefit to our community.”