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Resgrid.com Blog | Open Source Dispatch
Your phone rings before dawn. A neighboring jurisdiction has a warehouse fire, your own crews are already committed, and dispatch is trying to figure out who can send people, what equipment can cross the line, who pays for overtime, and whether incoming personnel can legally operate under your command. If those answers live in old …
For first responders, CAD stands for Computer-Aided Dispatch, the system used to create calls, track unit status, and manage dispatch operations across tools like SMS, WhatsApp, or Slack. In other fields, CAD can also mean Computer-Aided Design or Coronary Artery Disease, which is why dispatch teams need to be clear about the context fast. If …
You're probably dealing with some version of this right now. A call starts small, then stretches. More units arrive. Mutual aid checks in. Someone asks for traffic control, someone else asks for medical, and two supervisors start giving different directions to the same crews. That's the moment when incident command responsibilities stop being a training …
The call comes in. A storm has knocked out a feeder line, your dispatch board is half updated, one team is texting in a group thread, another is on radio, and the supervisor is working from a printed continuity plan that was last revised months ago. Nobody is sure which generator site was already checked, …
The tones drop, three callers report the same highway pileup, and your dispatch floor shifts from routine to overload in seconds. One person is trying to confirm location details, another is calling mutual aid, someone else is checking unit availability, and the radio traffic starts stepping on itself. The team is experienced, but the process …
The phones are already ringing. One caller can't give a clear location. Another incident is waiting for unit assignment. A supervisor is covering a console because someone called out again. The CAD feels older than the carpet, the radio traffic is stacked, and every proposed “modernization” comes with a contract size that would flatten a …
At a lot of departments, the shift calendar for firefighters still lives in three places at once. A spreadsheet on a battalion chief's laptop. A whiteboard at the station. A text thread that starts calm on Monday and turns into a scramble by Friday. That setup works right up until someone calls out sick at …
A lot of teams are running an incident management workflow right now without calling it that. A dispatcher is juggling radio traffic, a supervisor is texting updates from a personal phone, someone is writing times on a glove or notepad, and the person in charge is trying to keep a moving scene in their head. …
A lot of agencies are in the same spot right now. Dispatchers are juggling radio traffic, a caller is giving half-clear location details, patrol units are checking in over voice because status changes don't flow automatically, and someone is still writing key incident details into a side log because the main system can't keep up. …
You're probably dealing with one of two situations right now. Your current dispatch system still works, but crews complain about slow screens, awkward unit updates, and too many workarounds. Or you're shopping for a replacement and every vendor demo looks polished until you start asking the questions that matter, like what happens when the internet …