What Determines Which Fire Department Responds to an Incident?
Each parcel in the county is assigned to a primary fire district based on its assigned frontage road and sometimes its street number, which in turn is determined by the position of the entrance of the driveway. The two secondary departments for that address are usually the two closest neighboring departments, now identified at the discretion of the Central E911 dispatcher. All three departments were actually earlier defined in the MSAG database, but for several reasons, it is not now used by dispatch. In other Central E911 databases there are often additional details such as type of structures and characteristics of driveways.
Structure and Wildland Fires
Central E911 dispatches all three fire departments at once; the primary department and the two secondary departments that respond as automatic aid. Central E911 expects to receive a radio or phone acknowledgment within two minutes that a firefighter from each of the three departments is on their way to their station to drive an apparatus to the incident. If that acknowledgment is not received from a particular department within that period, that department is paged a second time and a fourth department is included in that page in the conservative assumption that the first-paged department cannot immediately respond.
The local Georgia Forestry Commission station is also notified if a citizen or firefighter reports to Central E911 that there is a significant wildland fire or the threat that a structure fire or powerline will create one.
Vehicle Accidents, Turnovers, and Vehicle Fires
Reports of an overturned vehicle result in at least the primary fire department being paged. This is because of the possibility that they subsequently catch on fire due to leaking fuel. Vehicles reported to be on fire warrant the simultaneous page of the primary and at least one of the secondary departments. Failure of a department to acknowledge the page within two minutes results in a second page and a page to another fire department, as described above for Structure and Wildland Fires.
First reports of vehicle accidents to Central E911 are often incomplete as to entrapments, injuries or leaking fuel, so fire departments are increasingly paged for vehicle accidents with incomplete information. Fire department apparatus should also be used to protect Sheriff Office, EMS, EMR and wrecker responders from traffic as they work the incident.
Smoke or Fire Alarms Reported by Security Companies
These are treated as structure fires, as described above for Structure and Wild-land Fires.
Other Incidents
Downed trees, power lines in roadways, fires already extinguished by residents, and others, even a cat in a tree (yes, there have been such incidents) are paged to the primary fire department and often to at least one of the secondary departments.