ANAHEIM : Fire Center Finds Sharing Delivers

When the 83rd call came in Monday at the North Net Fire Communications Center, dispatcher Paul Marks suddenly found himself in the role of obstetrician. An Anaheim couple’s baby was arriving sooner than expected.

Though paramedics reached the home only two minutes after being dispatched, the baby got there first. Marks calmly talked the father through the delivery, relaying a series of medical procedures from a computer program and a reference book.

“Try to keep the baby warm,” he instructed the father, “and don’t cover up its face.”

Marks directed the event from the high-tech communications center on the third floor of Anaheim’s City Hall West. The center serves fire departments in Anaheim, Orange, Garden Grove and Fullerton--and may be expanded next year to include Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley.

Anaheim Fire Chief Jeff Bowman said such a “regionalization” of fire dispatch operations would result in faster response times to emergency calls and could save the seven cities a total of $500,000 annually by reducing overhead.

“I think it’s probably one of the most important issues that I’ve dealt with in fire services in the last 10 years,” Bowman said.

The money saved by sharing technology, he added, could be used to add equipment such as a satellite-tracking system to pinpoint the exact location of all the fire engines and paramedic units in the seven cities. That way, the units nearest to an emergency scene could be identified immediately.

“We’d be expanding our ability to handle emergencies,” Bowman said, “without going back to the city councils for more money.”

North Net, which moved into its new facilities last summer, has a computer system capable of handling 250,000 calls a year, Bowman said, adding that the system now responds to 48,000 annually from the four cities that share it.