RUMFORD – Efforts to better coordinate police, fire and emergency mutual-aid responses and equipment use in Oxford County are under way, thanks to nearly $230,000 in federal money.
Earlier this year, four River Valley area fire chiefs and an ambulance director wrote U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant applications to enhance response times and help make the county and responders safer.
“The grants were written toward a regional approach, and we included the whole county, so this will help us, Mexico, Norway, everybody,” Rumford Fire Chief John Woulfe III said late Thursday afternoon.
Woulfe, Peru Chief Bill Hussey, Mexico Chief Gary Wentzell, Andover Chief Ken Dixon and Med-Care Ambulance Director Dean Milligan wrote the applications.
Hussey is also a deputy chief for the NewPage Corp. regional response team, which also doubles as the county’s hazardous-materials response team.
Of the money, which was awarded last month:
• $71,934 went to Med-Care in Mexico to buy and outfit a 2005 GMC Yukon sport-utility vehicle for use as a multi-agency mobile command post.
• $70,975 went to the NewPage Corp. team in Rumford for a mobile cascade purified breathing-air system.
• $86,960 went to the Oxford County Regional Communication Center in Paris for software to allow dispatchers to automatically provide computer-assisted, coordinated responses to a large variety of incidents.
Oxford County Emergency Management Agency Director Scott Parker in Paris said Tuesday afternoon that the three items are much needed additions.
“Our major risks in the county are the NewPage mill and the electrical power plant in Rumford,” he said, which is why the portable self-contained, breathing-air tank-refilling system is to be parked at Mexico’s fire station.
Parker said Tuesday that without the mobile system, county firefighters had to travel back and forth to NewPage or other departments to refill air tanks.
That is a major inconvenience for on-scene firefighters.
Parker envisioned multiple uses for mass-casualty responses with the Med-Care command vehicle.
He said it will “enhance the Rumford area, and, for the county, it’s fantastic! Say there is an incident at the Fryeburg Fair, a large fire, an explosion or the grandstands collapse, who knows,” Parker said.
It is also large enough to haul the county’s first ever mass-casualty incident trailer directly to such scenes.
Woulfe and Dixon said the new dispatching software would provide dispatchers with a database of every emergency apparatus in the county and all target hazards, so that multiple departments can be dispatched effortlessly all at once.
“It will eliminate the piecemeal approach and free up incident commanders to worry about the scene itself,” Woulfe said.
“It will be a lot of saving time, and take a hell of a burden off the first responder, because there’s nobody running around with all that information in the back of their head,” Dixon said Tuesday afternoon.
Data for the system, however, will have to be provided by fire chiefs, because a $60,000 grant application to hire a data-entry person was denied, Milligan said.
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