M2ZSF
M2ZSF is the Home Office allocated Radio Call Sign for Tayside Fire Brigade's Control Room. Over the radio control call themselves Fire Control on all transmissions.
The Control Room is the heart of the Brigade and like the human body the Brigade could not function without it.
Locations
1975 Controls at Blackness Road, Dundee (1969) and Perth (date?).
1979 Blackness Road, Dundee.
1994? Separate Building at MacAlpine Road, Dundee. Photo
Officer in Charge
1978 SCO J. B. S. Mcfarlane
Establishment
1978 (Dundee only) 1 Senior Control Operator
2 Leading Control Operators
16 Control Operators
1979 (Blackness Road) 4 Senior Control Operators
4 Leading Control Operators
8 Control Operators
(Overall establishment of 18 to cover for training, illness and holidays)
1991 1 Fire Control Officer
4 Senior Control Operators
4 Leading Control Operators
9 Control Operators
Notes
8th January 1979 centralisation of the control at Perth along with the other control into a single Control Room at Blackness Road.
The present Command and Control Centre at MacAlpine Road has three operating positions and one supervisory position plus a training room.
Perth fire control room moving to Dundee
By Les Stewart
The Perth control room of
Tayside Fire Brigade’s “B” Division, which covers a large slice of Perthshire,
is to be centralised in Dundee “sometime in December”, Firemaster Alfred Jones
said yesterday.
The final date will depend on the installation and testing of new communications
equipment.
An integral part of the change over will be the scrapping of the outdated sirens
which at present warn firemen in “B” Division’s 10 retained and three volunteer
stations of an emergency.
Instead, the men will be issued with pocket alerters which they will be able to
carry about with them at all times. The “bleepers”, which cost £200 each, will
have a radius of five miles from their triggering station.
Firemaster Jones said that the centralisation was part of a £180,000 scheme
covering the whole of Tayside. The first phase, covering most of Angus, was
completed in May.
He added that “when completed, they would have a centralised control and
communications system based at Blackness Road, Dundee.
“This will mean that the public will get a more cost effective and efficient
service,” he said.
There are approximately nine people working in the Perth control at the moment.
All the permanent staff there have been offered jobs in Dundee.
At a recent meeting of the general purposes committee of Tayside Regional
Council’s police and fire committee, a rank structure for the centralised
control was agreed.
This will be four senior control operators, four leading control operators and
eight control operators, making a total of 16, with an overall establishment of
18 to cover for training, illness and holidays.
(Perthshire Advertiser, Date 1978)
New control centre for fire brigade HQ
A new command and control centre for
Tayside Fire Brigade is to be built in the grounds of Dundee headquarters at a
cost of almost £2 million, writes our local Government reporter.
Tayside’s police and fire committee yesterday unanimously approved a report by
Firemaster Derek Marr outlining proposals for the new facility.
Mr Marr said the Tayside Brigade operates a centralised control system whereby
all emergency calls are received in the control room at Blackness Road
headquarters.
Emergency calls are received via a British Telecom AD9000 system and the details
of the incident are entered into a computer which logs the call and defines the
relevant resources to attend.
Control room staff then alert full time staff via a British Telecom Solent
callout system and retained personnel by pocket alerter.
These procedures are carried out manually.
Mr Marr said the disadvantages of the system were that: the manual operation of
a number of functions delayed mobilising of firefighting appliances; there is
more likelihood of operator error; the present system does not conform to Home
Office guidelines on the next generation of mobilising and communication
systems.
British Telecom have now ceased production of the Solent/AD9000 system.
The Tayside Brigade’s present control room was commissioned in 1969 to meet the
needs of the then Angus Area Fire Brigade.
Although it has been upgraded twice since then and is able to meet the needs of
the brigade at present, Mr Marr said it is considered too restricted in area and
lacking many of the facilities incorporated in modern control rooms.
The regional council’s director of property services has recommended that a new
control centre be built in the headquarters’ grounds thereby releasing the
existing control room for office accommodation.
Mr Marr said the preferred options were installation of a complete
computer-based command and control system in a new purpose-built control centre
and equipment room coupled with use of the present control room for offices.
He said it was not possible to give other that an estimated cost for the work as
the brigade would require to go to competitive tender.
However, a total cost of £1,970,000 was indicated.
The council’s financial plan 1990/96 contains an allowance of £1,670,000 for the
project and Mr Marr recommended that the committee agree to adjust the revised
capital estimates to take account of the additional cost.
(Courier and Advertiser, Wednesday, March 6, 1991.)
OBSOLETE EQUIPMENT ON WAY OUT
Early next year Tayside Fire brigade’s new command and control system goes ‘on stream’ .Work on the new system, to be housed in purpose built Control Headquarters in Dundee, began in 1986 and is described in this paper.
By Fmr DEREK MARR
Tayside’s new command and control system features latest technology
Faced with the growing obsolescence
of existing equipment and the need to integrate command. control and management
information systems. Tayside Fire Brigade realised in 1986 that the time had
come to reappraise all aspects of communications, electronic data acquisition
and transmission and the necessary accommodation.
Pre-planning started then and in 1989 a project team consisting of brigade
personnel with input from regional council support departments was set up to
consider the way forward.
In addition to the growing obsolescence of communications equipment and
mobilising software the current control accommodation, which was opened in 1970.
was originally designed to house VF system A and card index cabinets. It was
therefore totally unsuitable for a modern computerised command and control
system.
Tayside Fire Brigade protects an area of some 3,000 square miles with a
population in the region of 392,000. There are six wholetime stations, 15
retained and four volunteer with an establishment of 409 wholetime, 298 retained
and 38 volunteer officers and firefighters. The brigade deals with approximately
15,000 emergency calls per year and this is rising in line with current trends.
Purpose-built structure
It was decided that the new command
and control system would be housed in a purpose-built building adjacent to a
wholetime fire station and divisional headquarters in Dundee.
This building was designed to accommodate the latest command and control,
communications and management information systems and provide scope for future
upgrading. It incorporates facilities for management of major disasters and
protracted incidents in addition to modern facilities for fire control staff.
Following the production of a detailed operational requirement by the project
team, tenders were invited for the replacement command and control system in
early 1992. After extensive discussion and evaluation of the proposals from
interested companies a short list of three was drawn up from whom detailed
tenders were sought.
Following further appraisal the contract was awarded in March 1993 to Fortek
Computers Ltd of Gosport who will act as the prime contractor for the supply of
software and hardware and assume responsibility for the management of the entire
project.
As the prime contractor, it will be responsible for all sub contractors, which
for this bid includes the major manufacturers British Telecom, Philips
Communications Systems, Multitone Communication Systems, Cyfas Restbury
International and ASC Telecom.
Value of contract
The contract, valued at £1.3
million, will provide Tayside with Fortek’s Fires III central mobilising and GIS
systems and, the Philips DX3000 integrated switch for its new Control
Headquarters at Macalpine Road, Dundee.
Tayside will also be installing the latest out station computer equipment to all
its stations with Kilostream networks to the wholetime stations and radio bearer
to retained stations.
The control room has four main objectives:
• To receive emergency calls.
• To mobilise the most suitable operational resources to an
incident as quickly as possible.
• To provide information in support to the operational resources
dealing with the incident.
• To provide and maintain up to date relevant information.
The system to be installed comprises a number of key elements:
1 Command and control system.
2 Telephone/radio call handling system.
3 Communications network.
4 Fire station callout equipment.
5 Resource availability display.
6 Paging systems.
7 Geographical information system.
8 Digital voice logging.
The Fires III system will provide the incident receipt, dispatch, logging and
monitoring facilities as specified by the brigade and mobilise resources at out
stations. The GIS system will interface to the mobilising system and give a
visual representation of the region showing complete resource locations, which
will be automatically updated in the computer as the incident progresses.
At the heart of the system the hardware configuration proposed for the central
mobilising system is a dual ICL DRS6000 Spark/Risk model L440 running Unix
version 5.4. The system is modular in design, providing flexible interface to
existing facilities and allows for the addition of new facilities as demanded by
future changes to the brigade’s operational requirements.
The configurations proposed offer a high degree of resilience and an upgrade
path that will cater for all the projected increases in the brigade’s workload
and capabilities to support the future enhancements likely to be required during
the lifetime of the system.
The operator/supervisor’s interface will be via a powerful 486.33 MHz Compaq
PCs. In addition to providing a comfortable human computer interface, these
workstations will afford the brigade enormous flexibility to evolve operating
procedures with the minimum of impact on users. The integrated communication
systems (ICCS) proposed is the DX3000 ‘touch screen’ system supplied by Philips.
This equipment encompasses the most recent advantages in digital technology and
is compliant with the Home Office C3 specification.
The ICCS software switch is a central component in the proposed integrated
radio, telephony and communications network.
The DX3000 switch will interface with the brigade’s existing multi-channelled FM
radio system with minimal disruption and equipment alterations and will
interface to the proposed BT Kilostream digital network via standard
terminations.
Latest technology
The latest touch-screen surface
acoustic wave technology is used for the operator’s work station to provide a
simple but reliable user interface for all radio and telephone circuits. The
screen presentation is designed to meet the twin objectives of operational
efficiency with the minimum operator fatigue.
A key factor of the DX3000 is its modular design which will enable the future
expansion and system enhancement to be carried out without the need for major
operation interruption. To safeguard against any failure in the switch an
independent fallback system is proposed which provides full control over the
radio and telephone using conventional PBX consoles and an M87 radio controller
unit.
The proposed communications network is the British Telecom Kilostream with
channels between the command and control centre and all six of the wholetime
operational stations. The Kilostream network will provide three functions
between all wholetime stations:
• Transfer of mobilisating data.
• Transfer of administrative data.
• Desk to desk telephony between all whole-time stations and departments.
The primary communication bearer to the retained stations will be the brigade’s
existing radio network with hard copy printers supplying the address of the
incidents. Linked with the station equipment will be industry-standard PC being
supplied by Fortek with its out station software which will implement the
recently specified Home Office communications protocols for mobilising messages.
The PC configured with industrial-standard communication and interface cards
will be capable of controlling and monitoring all station equipment used for
mobilising appliances and crews and interrogating the MIS side of the central
computing systems.
It is intended that this will be developed in the future to carry out
administrative functions by linking all meetings to brigade and divisional
headquarters.
The Multitone Firecoder alert system will operate the tone pagers at retained
stations with senior officers using Multitone alpha-numeric pagers on a wide
area paging system which covers the whole of the Tayside Region. This allows
officers to travel anywhere within the region and still be easily contactable by
fire control -
The maintenance of most of the equipment will be carried out by Tayside Region’s
radio workshops and the Department of Information Processing Services who will
continue to provide a 24-hour service to the brigade throughout the year.
It is hoped the new computerised command and control system will go live early
in 1994, and take the brigade through into the 21st Century.
(Fire magazine, Scottish Feature, August 1993. Page 16.)
If you know of any mistakes in this or have any additional information please let me know.