After the Detroit Fire Department's Rube Goldberg-like alert system received national publicity over the past week, several national software companies have offered to install a 21st-Century alarm arrangement, Tresa Baldas reports in the Free Press.
Detroit firefighters receive emergency alerts in their stations via a variety of jerry-rigged ways, most notably with a pop can filled with coins or screws that gets knocked over by a piece of paper that rolls through a fax machine sent from the central dispatcher. The rattle signals an emergency.
In most fire departments, alerts come in automatically from the community's 911 center.
For tech gurus nationwide, the pop-can story sounded an alarm, Baldas reports.
“I just could not believe it. I thought it was a joke at first,” George Faucher, president and CEO of CorreLog, a computer software company in Naples, Fla, told her.
Four companies contacted the fire department this week; three other interested parties contacted the Free Press. The paper's video on the alerts, by Baldas, was featured on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” this week.
Deputy Fire Commissioner John Berlin said the offers to help have been humbling. Calls have come in from as far away as California and Oregon.
The offers for help are reminiscent of the way people and companies across the nation responded when media reports revealed the DFD had run out of toilet paper at some stations. Before long the department had received hundreds of thousands of rolls.
