Rod Ammon: Welcome to the ResponderSafety.com Podcast, brought to you by the Emergency Responder Safety Institute, a committee of the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association. To remain mindful of why we do this work, we start every podcast with an update of emergency responders struck by fatalities. In 2020, 46 emergency responders were struck and killed while assisting the public on the roadway. We have information on the loss of these responders and a memorial tribute available at ResponderSafety.com/fatalityreports. Our thoughts are with their families and colleagues. Please visit ResponderSafety.com for more than 150 resources in training that will help you operate more safely at roadway incidents and educate the public about how to safely avoid or pass an emergency scene on the roadway. Beginning in 2022, Hanover County Fire EMS retrofitted their emergency vehicles with digital alerting technology. Digital alerting is connected vehicle technology that transmits the location of the vehicle to traffic apps, fleet management control, and in some cases, to other emergency vehicles or direct to civilian vehicles. Currently, about 75 Hanover County fire EMS emergency vehicles have digital alerting installed. The retrofitting is partly funded for five years through a Virginia Department of Transportation grant. The retrofitting grant covers initial installation and hardware, then the locality picks up the annual service fee. New units come equipped with digital alerting direct from the manufacturer. With us here today to discuss how Hanover County Fire EMS implemented digital alerting and what their experience has been with it over the last three years. Our Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback and Lieutenant Jacob B. Smith from the department and Matt Phillips, Safety and Risk Manager for the Hanover County Government and Hanover County Public Schools. Battalion Chief Stainback has 17 years with Hanover Fire EMS. He currently serves in fire administration where he oversees logistics and safety and risk. Chief Stainback has served in the operations division and office of the fire marshal as the department's hazmat officer. Lieutenant Jacob B. Smith has been with Hanover Fire EMS for nine years. He's currently serving as the fleet manager in the logistics division, overseeing all aspects of fleet operations and maintenance. Previously, Lieutenant Smith served in operations as a firefighter and station lieutenant. Mr. Phillips has over 20 years of experience in industrial hygiene, construction, and general industry safety, risk management, and emergency services. For Hanover, he fosters safe work environments by overseeing safety programs, risk management initiatives, and claims administration. He's a certified EMT and a former volunteer fire department lieutenant and safety officer. Welcome gentlemen, and thank you for joining us.

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: Thank you for having us.

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: Yes sir. Thank you.

Matthew Phillips: Thank you for having us.

Rod Ammon: We're very grateful for your time. It's great to get the background that you have all been able to achieve through doing what you've done. So let's jump in. So how did the concept of digital alerting first come to the department's attention? One of you want to start out with that?

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: I'll take that and again, thanks for having us. We take highway safety very seriously and unfortunately in 2018 we had one of the members of our department who was killed in the line of duty operating on one of the major highways in our county. And efforts after that accident continued to ensure the safety of our responders while operating really anywhere but in particular on the roadways, which is one of the major hazards that we have here in Hanover. So in looking at that and trying to determine the best course of action, the fleet manager at the time investigated digital alerting as an opportunity for us to sort of in the background of our operations be alerting motorists to our operations where we were giving pre-alerts, helping folks get enough time to slow down and move over. We've had a lot of luck with that and we take that priority very seriously.

Rod Ammon: How did you find out about it?

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: Through research and participation in conferences and discussions. We located some grant opportunities and really learned about the system and how we could implement it into our current operations. And we also have some of our vendors that we participate with purchasing vehicles that had some information on the product and even included the products in their specifications with service agreements at no expense to the project. So that really helps sort launch us and point us in the right direction of specific products and implementing those into our current and future builds.

Rod Ammon: I think I remember that you guys had HAAS alert or HAAS alert, which one of you would want to talk about what is digital alerting and how it works?

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: From the layman's perspective on what it looks like to the end user, the best way that I can describe it is if you're going to the grocery store or you're out of town and you need to go to the grocery store, you put in your GPS, put on Waze, Google Maps, whatever you're using on your smartphone that may be synced to your vehicle on your screen. And if you're familiar with Waze or any of these applications, a lot of them will tell you accident ahead or whatever the case may be. And in this instance, what the digital alerting is doing is it's actually pushing that notification to different devices for us primarily being citizens that there's an emergency vehicle responding. So that's kind of the core of it. There's a couple different layers to the product that we have and things that it can do, but the down and dirty on it is it sending a signal to people's devices that say there is an emergency vehicle coming, proceed with caution. And we also have the ability to have our fire apparatus and medic units talk to each other and if we have two units responding to the same intersection, it has the ability to notify each unit that there's an incoming apparatus so that they're not both trying to go through the intersection with lights and sirens on at the same time at a higher rate of speed than normal.

Rod Ammon: Makes great sense. So considering the fact that we've got a lot of responders that are looking into these kinds of technologies, let's go a little bit deeper with it and talk about how you did it. How was it to transition and technically what did you have to do to the vehicle?

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: When we started the project, obviously it was grant funded and there were certain requirements on the grant as to how much money was allocated and a portion of the grant funding was primarily used for the retrofit on all of these vehicles. And what I mean by that is the device itself looks nothing... I mean it's essentially the size of an iPhone and it's got a Nintendo on it and it basically sits on the dash wherever you decide to position it in said vehicle and there's basically three wires. One of them is power ground and then one of them is a trigger wire and that trigger wire gets wired to one of the emergency lights on the vehicle. So when that vehicle activates its emergency lights, that transponder starts sending out a signal and that signal is what the other user would be seeing when they're getting notification that there's an emergency vehicle incoming when it gets in proximity and picks up that transponder signal. As far as what we did to implement that into our system, we had to make a decision, this is how much money we have, this is how many transponders we can get right now, what are the critical units to put that on? So for us, that was all of our frontline engines and ambulances and our ladder trucks. We did not do our second out units, our brush trucks, things that spend a lot less time driving emergent on the road. We prioritized the units that are responding the most. We were able to get all of those retrofitted essentially our in-house radio shop to help with a lot of these installs. We did have a contractor that went around and did a good portion of the installs as well. And then as far as the financial impact of that, we were on a five-year subscription because once we installed the devices and had that upfront cost that was supplemented with the grant, we were then responsible for the contract term after that.

Rod Ammon: Makes a lot of sense and I appreciate you going into some of that detail. So how did fire and EMS collaborate on the project? Do you guys have separate situations where fire and EMS had to communicate? I'm just trying to share maybe a model where the fire department and the EMS folks may be in a separate situation. Maybe that's not the case in yours.

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: In Hanover, we are under one organization and while we do have two volunteer in corporations that are handling their own vehicles, we all work very well together and all of that funnels through sort of our fleet folks. When we have a new, let's call it a thing, it could be anything, but this would be no different than any other piece of equipment that we're standardizing across the department. So for the vast majority of all of our vehicles, all of our fleet decisions, they're all made at at the county fire and EMS level and we... Lieutenant Smith manages all of those vehicles in that implementation and I manage that through the budget process and the contract piece of that. So I think that the products that are out there for digital alerting and the safety features that they provide speak to themselves and we'd had no problem seeing the value in that and implementing that across our fleet.

Rod Ammon: Thanks for sharing that. As you've gone through this, what's the plan to sustain the digital alerting implementation as your fleet turns over?

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: Like Chief Stainback already mentioned, one luxury that we do have is that the apparatus that we are specifying and the manufacturers that we are buying from offer this as an option for us to add in the specifications. So the unit is already coming to us with it installed, it's active, and it gets added to our dashboard as soon as the truck is here. From a long-term aspect, one thing that we just did was renegotiate with our digital alerting company, the contract that we had in place. Like I said, we were on a five-year contract from the origin of the program and we were coming up on year four, so we engaged them on some conversations and we actually were able to negotiate a ten-year contract, which they were great to work with in that sense, but we were able to lock in some pricing and in the long run it will allow us to continue to expand the program across our fleet as we're prioritizing vehicles. I think right now we have 74 vehicles with this technology in it. Our fleet is overall about 180, but as far as emergency response vehicles, we're probably over 75% fully outfitted in where we want to be. And then with them allowing us to negotiate the contract that is going to give us the ability to expand the program as years progress, as more funding becomes available, et cetera.

Rod Ammon: That's great. Sounds like you guys have really taken this on full bore and well that's why you're here and we'll be able to share more. One of the things I really like and we didn't talk about it, but to me you all have enough to learn and enough things to be thinking about, and I love the simplicity of this where you just turn on the lights and boom, you're letting potentially hundreds, thousands of people know where you are. So that's a wonderful thing. What's been the response to using digital learning? What's the feedback from the field and leadership?

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: I'll take that one. So we've had this conversation fairly regularly and it's a very hard thing to quantify and I think part of the reason behind that is every single day the alarm goes off, trucks are going out the door, they're going to calls. Well, we don't know what we're preventing with this technology. We know it's a mechanism that we can put in place. Inherently it's making the situation safer, but at the end of the day, we don't know what the end user is changing about their driving patterns that are preventing a potential accident. It's just a step that we can put in place. It seems to be working. Fingers crossed, we have not had any tragedies since the last one that Chief Stainback spoke about, but one thing that we are able to see is we get a monthly report of essentially every time the device is activated and how many notifications it makes. Don't quote me on the numbers, but I mean these can be in the thousands ballpark depending on the month, depending on call volume, etc. So we know the notifications are happening, we know that it's working. The feedback from the field is that everyone does tremendously, overwhelmingly like the technology. It is one of those things where it's very hard to quantify the results of what we're doing.

Rod Ammon: It's a tough thing. It's tough with us too. Even as we're doing training, it's hard to know what you've stopped from happening, what you've avoided. So my understanding is beyond the alerts, there are other benefits of digital alerting to the fire department.

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: So with the dashboard that we have, it essentially can become GPS tracking in a sense, if you think of it that way. If you pull up your computer, you have a map of whatever area these vehicles are in, no different than if you log onto Google Maps right now and you see all of your units in live time, whether they're responding or not. One thing that Fire and EMS's IT department has done is since our product is an Esri-based platform, they were able to take that data that's essentially live time and overlay that to different dashboards that they're building in Esri to capture data points, figure out unit location, figure out when units are responding. And that is one thing that we wanted to make sure we added into our new contract for the ten-year term was that we had essentially lifetime rights to that data so we could continue to have those benefits of building dashboards based on a system that we already had in place for a completely different use, if that makes sense.

Rod Ammon: It makes a lot of sense. Another great justification for the funding in the first place. I had my notes here that sometimes the telemetry can be used for crash investigation and I'm sure you'll find other uses down the road. Anything else you want to say about the use of that data?

Matthew Phillips: I'll jump in on this one. From a risk management standpoint, for us that data is useful as you mentioned for telemetry. It also helps us as we interact with the public, so if we are involved in a situation where we have an accident that involves one of our apparatus with a citizen's vehicle, which happens from time to time. It gives us the ability to go back and pull that data to look at it for claims purposes so that as we're submitting claims on behalf of not only our entity but on behalf of the citizen in most cases. It gives us a full and complete picture of what actually happened so that we have a very good, not only do we have feedback from our folks that were involved and from the citizen, but we have objective data that shows us, this is what we think actually happened and we can sort of gain a better picture so that from a claim standpoint, we're legitimately addressing claims that are legitimate for us to address, but we're also looking at claims that maybe that really wasn't a claim after all.

Rod Ammon: Mr. Phillips, I think this might also be another question for you. When it comes to discussing technologies, we get a lot of questions about funding. Can you talk about how you acquired the funds to add digital learning?

Matthew Phillips: I think probably either Matthew or Jacob can jump in here, but for the digital alerting at least, I know we started with the grant and I believe that grant was through VDOT, if I'm not mistaken. And then from subsequent budgetary cycles we've been able to add additional funding because I think folks see the value of the software. I can tell you from my vantage point, probably the biggest thing is that, and I think it's already been pointed out, you never know what it really prevents, but it's there as another tool that helps to keep our folks safe on the highway when they're out there from a risk perspective. So I think just seeing that potential benefit has really sort of generated interest in continuing to fund it from a budgetary standpoint year in and year out. So I can't speak to all of the funding sources, but I can say that I think the grant helped us get kicked off and since then we've been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system to some degree, for lack of a better term. It's a very good insurance policy to have, I think, regardless of whether we know the results are positive or not.

Rod Ammon: I appreciate that perspective, Mr. Phillips. And I'm sure from your position you're looking at budgetary issues and as you said, the long-term plans that go on with this. Matthew or Jacob, would you like to talk a little bit more about how you went out got this grant a little bit more detail so that others might learn from it?

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: I mean, what I would say to folks that are looking to advance their safety programs and implement digital alerting into their fleet and their response procedures is obviously what we did at the time the lieutenant in charge of the fleet went out and it was a Department of Transportation grant that was utilized initially to assist with existing vehicles and like we've talked about some of the current fleet that we are purchasing, the different vendors offer this through their procurement process. But from Hanover's perspective, I don't think that there's any higher priority than our personnel and our personnel's safety. And our fire chief and our county administration has really supported those efforts through our budgetary processes. And whether it's digital alerting or it's cancer prevention or ensuring that our facilities have the varying safety features and our apparatus have all of the safety features that are necessary to protect our members. That's really how we have shown that through our budget process and through our focuses, we have been able to continue the funding here. We've spoken about the contract negotiations that we've recently been through to ensure the longevity of the project, but getting back to somebody that's looking at implementing these, those are things that need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be a high priority in your budget process to understand and maintain the long-term expenses of these while seeing the value in protecting the members of the organization. So yes, the grants are very helpful for your initial implementation. That's one piece of it. I would say you need to look there. You need to look at who you're running your specifications through to purchase your apparatus and incorporate this system into that specification to ensure that now I've got my current fleet taken care of, I've got my future fleet taken care of through the apparatus specification piece, and then look at your long-term budget planning and put those placeholders in to ensure that you can maintain that service for a long-term.

Rod Ammon: Mr. Phillips, I think there was a comment that you had talked about the benefits of digital alerting, which have already been mentioned by Matthew and Jacob, I believe, where it's hard to measure. Is there something you wanted to talk about or are there things that you would like to talk about as far as when you're looking at it from an analysis perspective? What are you getting from your vendor that's helpful and what do you believe is communicated to those who are providing the funding where it makes it feel worthwhile?

Matthew Phillips: From a pure risk management standpoint, I try to look at it from a holistic perspective. First and foremost, it's critically important for our fire and EMS crews because of the nature of the work that they do and the risk that's involved with that. Quite frankly, I think this type of system for them specifically lowers that risk, which is always the goal. You'll never eliminate risk, you'll just do as much as you can to make that risk minimal. As you look at it and you think about it, it also becomes a thought process of, well, how could that technology be expanded? Because we not only have fire and EMS from a public safety standpoint, we also have our sheriff's department as well. Could that potentially expand at some point and could we use that to place into sheriff's vehicles as well? And even to a lesser extent, we have a lot of fleet vehicles that are on the road quite a bit, particularly with our public works and our public utilities departments where they're inspecting meters or reading meters or that sort of thing, and they have similar risk because they're within the roadway or the right-of-way for the roads. It makes it that big. So I think from a budgeting standpoint, the one thing that I can say is that I would agree with Matthew's assessment. I think that our county administration is very keen to where we are and providing our teams with the best resources and the best technology that we can possibly get to help protect them. No technology is foolproof and I think we've all sort of intimated that. But without it, your risk profile is so much greater. With it, you at least have another tool in your risk toolbox to prevent hopefully something from happening similar to what occurred in 2018. And that's really the ultimate goal. How can we use this as a catalyst to expand it further to places where it might be needed? And it may not be the current system, we may end up using some other type of alerting technology, but I think the alerting technology period is a great thing because it can be expanded. And budgetary-wise, I think that, as Matthew said, our fire chief, our county administration are really geared towards setting our people up for success. And so I think it's been easier to... When you have leadership that's bought into providing the tools necessary to maintain the safety of the employees that are impacted, it makes the budgeting process a whole lot easier because a lot of times you have to sort of explain why it's important. But when you have that leadership, it makes it a lot easier to get the budgetary resources for it.

Rod Ammon: That's good to hear. We don't talk about it, but it seems very natural to me from the work that we've done providing education and training, utilizing expertise from people around the country. There was always this, first of all, a manual or visual way of doing advanced warning. And to me that has proven to be, and again, it's hard to prove, but it seems to show that getting those signs out, having people know in advance is helpful to the safety of those working on a scene. It seems like a natural transition to go to something electronic, which not only gets in the face of drivers while they're driving and lets them know what's going on, but it also reduces the hazards of having to put out signs and some of those things. So I think that's an advantage. Any other advice, recommendations, any of you would like to share?

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: I think the last thing that I have, and we've kind of danced around it a little bit, is just that the world that we all live in, whether it be risk management, fire and EMS, highway safety, we're all hypersensitive to what the need is. We live in the world every day, we're in tune with what's going on, but a lot of the people making the decisions, the responsibility lies on the locality and the people who are in it every day to communicate the need. I mean, they're the ones that are seeing the different technology that's coming out and we have the responsibility... Whoever the locality may be looking to make a switch like this has the responsibility to make that priority known, make the technology known, and come up with the proposals and the plan for the implementation. Otherwise, everyone else, they don't know what they don't know, and that's nobody's fault. But there is a high emphasis on the responsibility on the locality and the individual departments to communicate the need.

Matthew Phillips: I would just add from my vantage point, it's always for me, having been in a fire service for a number of years and that sort of thing, I've experienced a lot of what both of these gentlemen have spoken about. But when you look at it from just a pure risk management standpoint, it's worth the investment. A lot of times the county and locality leadership only really sees the dollars that are immediately spent or that will be immediately spent. They don't see the long-term benefits and impacts. And while it's really still hard to judge or to understand how the technology has fully impacted what we've been able to do, I can't imagine that we've not seen some sort of impact from it in a positive light. So reducing risk is about finding new strategies and new techniques and new possibilities to help protect the people that honestly protect us. That to me is the biggest thing, is these folks are put in precarious situations on a day in and day out basis. And everything that we can do to help make them successful in returning home at the end of the day is absolutely worth the dollar amounts because in the long term, it will come back as a definite good return on an investment. The municipalities in many different ways, not just financially, but from a public relations standpoint, from a community standpoint, we are setting our, and from a workforce perspective. With these tools and these advancements, at least if I'm looking at it as an prospective employee coming in, I want to work for that municipality. They really are on the cutting edge of protecting their workers and providing the right tools and resources to help make that happen. So I think these types of things, it's a rising tide and it will eventually lift all ships, not in the short term, but you have to think about it from a long-term perspective.

Rod Ammon: Matthew, anything to add?

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: We are proud in Hanover to offer these opportunities and these features for our members. And like I said, many times here, there's no higher priority. And I think part of that responsibility in the fire service with basically anything is helping others and answering questions and passing along information to make the fire service in general, a safer place to operate. And technology is a large piece of that, and we've had good luck implementing this across our fleet.

Rod Ammon: Well, I appreciate all of your time today. I just wanted to remind people that Hanover County Fire EMS received a National Safety Council Significant Improvement award in 2024 for their focus on risk management and reducing the number of on-the-job injuries, including implementation of digital alerting. To learn more about Hanover County's Fire EMS digital alerting, use the links on this podcast page on RSLN.org. Congratulations on that, gentlemen, and thank you for being with us today.

Battalion Chief Matthew Stainback: Thank you for having us.

Matthew Phillips: Thank you for having us.

Lieutenant Jacob Smith: Thank you, sir.

Rod Ammon: Thank you guys. To learn more about connected vehicle technology, including digital alerting, you can take the online learning module Connected Vehicles on RSLN.org. Pass the test at the end of the module to receive your certificate of completion that may count toward fulfilling your department's continuing education requirements. Now for the news from ResponderSafety.com, keeping with a theme of retrofitting units with safety technologies for traffic incident management. ResponderSafety.com recently released a new video touring the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighter Association's Retrofitted Traffic 9 to see six low-cost high-impact responder safety technologies in action. Join Todd Leiss, Emergency Responder Safety Institute Assistant Director of Training for an inside look at Traffic 9, CVVFA's Model Traffic Unit. A link to the video is available on this podcast page on RSLN.org. Robust responder safety requires the public to be our partner when encountering emergency scenes on the roadway. The Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association Emergency Responder Safety Institute partnered with the American Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association, ADTSEA to create videos and classroom materials for driving instructors to use to teach their students how to safely avoid, encounter, and navigate emergency scenes on the roadway. The videos, lesson plans, supplement, and presentation are available at drivereducators.org. Finally, just a quick reminder to connect with us on social media for timely updates on news and emergency response and ResponderSafety.com activities, like and follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/ResponderSafety, on Instagram at Instagram.com/ResponderSafety, and on X at X.com/ResponderSafety. If you know of an incident where an emergency vehicle or a responder were struck while operating on a roadway incident, please report it at ReportStruckBy.com. We are collecting these reports to better understand how struck-by incidents occur so we can determine what training, public education, and safety messaging is needed to reduce struck-by incidents. Anyone can file a report. You can report anonymously. Reports from all response groups are accepted. This podcast, ResponderSafety.com and the Responder Safety Learning Network are made possible by funding from a Fire Prevention and Safety grant from the Assistance to Firefighters grant program administered by FEMA and the US Department of Homeland Security. We appreciate your support and remember to share these podcasts with your colleagues to spread the word about safety practices at roadway incident scenes. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Stay safe everybody, and we'll see you next time. For ResponderSafety.com, I'm Rod Ammon.

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