So, at the risk of showing that I am completely missing the point when it comes to the five little girls who were killed in Pennsylvania, I merely want to point out something I discovered when I first got the breaking news alert of the shooting: Lancaster County Fire & EMS Status.
This is a really amazing little service that provides a constantly updated website, an RSS feed, and a mobile version of every emergency call in the county. The status is updated every 2 minutes and the page
automatically refreshes.
This is an effective tool in a world of Open Source Emergency Response. That doesn’t mean that I would want to monitor it and act on the calls– that is for the professionals. But this tool helps Lancaster County citizens stay informed, and can help them be another to be a conduit of information. Very well done. I wonder how they made it and if it is available cheaply.
Update: I spoke with Todd Zimmerman of Lancaster County IT. He wrote the status page on top of the Dynamic Site Framework content management system. They host the site in their facilities, so they have access to dispatch databases.
