Airdrie Alberta - Firefighters in Airdrie are now aided in making it as quickly as possible to a call thanks to a new system of cameras at critical railway crossings installed in December 2014, according to Fire Chief Kevin Weinberger.
 
The system monitors train traffic at crossings at Veterans Boulevard and Yankee Valley Boulevard, sending an alert to responding trucks should their way across the tracks be blocked by a train.
 
"We still send firefighters from multiple stations," Weinberger said," but we upgrade them now if we know a train's gone through and we can see it right on our screens."
 
"We have a visual display in all our fire halls that tells our crews that there's either a train coming across one of the crossings or that has already gone through. We're able to update our other stations to either advance faster or that they can maintain their deployment."
 
Weinberger said the AFD monitors its response times on a monthly and quarterly basis.
 
The department's current response time averages five minutes and 29 seconds.
 
This average is based on 726 emergency calls in 2014.
 
Weinberger said this is less than the industry standard set by the National Fire Protection Agency in 2010 at six minutes, 50 seconds.
 
"The new system is working well," Weinberger said.
 
"We still haven't rolled it out completely to our crews. We don't have email notifications yet, just because we're working with some glitches on the notification piece. We're working out the kinks. The camera components in our stations and on our iPhones are working awesome."
 
Weinberger said captains and lieutenants are able to access the monitoring software anytime they want on their iPhones, allowing for immediate response.
 
The software to run the system was developed in-house by the City of Airdrie's information technology (IT) department.
 
"Our budget was $20,000 and we were quite a bit under budget at $14,000 for everything," Weinberger said.
 
"That even allowed us to buy some back up hardware in case we have any crashes."
 
The infrared system is the first of its kind in Canada, according to Weinberger.
 
The planning leading to implementation of the new system took approximately six months.
 
Weinberger said CP Rail does not allow the AFD to place anything on their crossing arms so much of the planning was figuring out where best to place the sensors.
 
"We had to come up with some alternatives ways through using cameras and infrared lighting that triggers a warning, basically just like in a garage, that can go across the tracks that we can monitor," he explained.
 
"We look after all the maintenance on it."

Christina Waldner.