New control room opened to assist Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service
A new control room has been launched which will support the fire service in Hertfordshire.
Hertfordshire County Council confirmed that its county is among the areas that will benefit from the new Motorola Solutions Guardian Hub.
A new hub has been created to speed up response times and make neighbouring services more resilient during times of emergencies.
This cloud-based hub will also link up with response teams based in Norfolk and Suffolk. The new system will enable the fire services to jointly manage emergency call handling and coordinate incidents between the three counties.
It has been revealed that the hub is the first of its kind to link emergency resources between three different fire services.
"The majority of emergency fire calls for the county will still be taken by Hertfordshire control room staff, but the new hub will allow calls to be seamlessly diverted to Norfolk and Suffolk control rooms at times of high demand, with Hertfordshire providing the same mutual aid to the two counties in return,” a spokesperson from Hertfordshire County Council revealed.
Motorola Solutions technology will be used to link the hub to more than 100 stations serving a population of over 2.5 million people.
Darren Cook, assistant chief fire officer at Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said: “Emergencies aren’t restricted by borders, and our responses shouldn’t be either. Working closely with Norfolk and Suffolk is already leading to more efficient and effective responses, and the chance to share knowledge on how we’re using this new technology has been incredibly valuable. Within hours of the hub going live, we saw the benefits, as Suffolk FRS operators took calls and managed dispatch for Hertfordshire FRS during a large structure fire incident.”
It has also been revealed that the hub will lead to the service’s merging their IT systems, which will lead to savings.
David Shorland, UK and Ireland sales director, Motorola Solutions. said: “Fire and rescue services are there for their communities, but the pressure they face continues to grow. Guardian Hub gives services a better way to connect, coordinate and respond. With agencies increasingly required to do more with less, we're providing a resilient, scalable model to help serve and protect communities.”