VIDEO: There’s A New App Out There For Firefighters

WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – One local volunteer fire department is using a new tool that’s making a big difference on the job.

You could easily call it Facebook for firemen, but it’s actually a smart phone app called Who’s Responding, and it sends fire alerts straight to firemen’s phones and they say it makes things easier.

“Whenever you receive a call, it sends you an alert just as if you were receiving a a phone call. Your fire tones go off, it shows you where the call is, and you can map it out on GPS, and also that live dispatch is coming through. It’s just like as if you carried a radio,” says Walthall Fire Department Fire Chief, Casey Henderson.

The Walthall Volunteer Fire Department is one of many departments across the state who is getting access at the touch of a fingertip.

“Everyone has their phones on them. You may leave your radio at home, but you’re always going to have your phone on you. A call comes in, it rings through your phone and all thirty-six of our members are receiving this call. It has made our response numbers pick up dramatically in the amount of people we’ve had responding to calls.”

‘Who’s Responding’ lets firefighters see exactly who is responding to calls and reaches responders at anytime.

“It does allow you to be reached just about anywhere you have your phone, so it’s a very useful tool. It’s something a lot of times that we have with our radios, we don’t have necessarily the best coverage sometimes in certain areas. This allows us to receive notifications regardless of where we are,” says Walthall Fire Department Captain Joey Palmer.

Volunteer firefighter Joe Hays was in Memphis at a concert and received an alert. He says he’s never seen anything like this in his two decades on the job.

“This is the first time that we’ve had the technology like this. When we began, all we had was pagers and so many times we were going to fires with no communication. As a matter of fact, when we began we had no 9-1-1.”

Easy access and better response time are good for the firemen and the cost savings are good for the taxpayers.

“A fire pager costs five or six hundred dollars. A fire radio, you know, for a handheld, is four or five hundred dollars for us, and the fact now that we can use this app reduces the amount of radios we have to purchase, batteries we have to replenish, and radios that are being torn up,” says Henderson.