SOUTH SIOUX CITY, Neb. (KTIV) – From car radios to cell phones, distractions easily happen on the road, meaning you may not hear an emergency vehicle approaching.
A new piece of technology being used by the South Sioux City Fire Department will bring real-time notifications for emergency responders near your location right to your phone or navigation system.
“It goes up to the cloud. It sends out a signal to people on their navigational systems and their vehicles to let them know that there’s an emergency vehicle in the roadway or approaching them,” explained South Sioux City Fire Chief Doug Koopman.
When you hear the familiar tone of emergency sirens, drivers are supposed to pull over and let them pass, but that doesn’t always happen.
“You just don’t hear us approaching. You know, we have many different sirens. We have the air horns and it still is not enough,” Koopman explained. “When the car is airtight, soundproof in the cabs with their radios going, they just don’t hear us or see us coming up on it or with all the distractions.”
Now a new piece of technology in use by South Sioux City’s Fire Department hopes to aid in bringing attention to emergency vehicles. It’s called the HAAS Alert’s Safety Cloud, a digital alerting system that sends real-time notifications to drivers in the proximity of emergency vehicles.
“Keep an ear out, keep an eye out and hopefully you can hear us coming with that, but this here you’ll start being alerted 1/2 mile in front of us that we are in the roadway,” said Koopman.
The alerts are sent to those using maps, like Apple and Waze, and are also available on the infotainment screens of millions of vehicles, specifically 2024 and newer models of Volkswagen vehicles and 2018 and newer models of Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram through the EVAS (Emergency Vehicle Alert System) feature.
“So anytime that they’re in, all they have to do is have the map running and it will pop right up,” Koopman said. “They don’t need to be navigating anywhere. It is just as a matter of fact that it’s running. It will pop up on there.”
The goal is the safety of the public and first responders on the road.
“Our most valuable assets are our workers, and if we happen to have an incident where a vehicle runs into them, which happens probably on a weekly basis somewhere across the country, just the time off and the injuries or the potential death of one of our workers,” Koopman said, “it’s unacceptable to me when we have this technology out here.”
An accident that takes an emergency vehicle out of service can also cause issues with emergency response in the community.
“If you run into one of our vehicles and take our vehicle out of service, we’re a small department and that’s going to be a major blow to not only our budget but to the response for the citizens here in South Sioux City that we’re not going have the number of vehicles that we need to respond to the emergencies,” explained Koopman.
This technology, while currently installed in four South Sioux City Fire Rescue vehicles, is available to any first responding agency, including tow truck drivers and DOT workers, ensuring the public is aware of where they are on the roads.
“That’s one of these things here for the public to understand the seriousness of when they see emergency providers or the tow companies or the DOT workers on the freeway, a critical accident or fatal accident can happen at 30 miles an hour, and that’s almost all of the roadways that we have here. If a car hits somebody at 30 miles an hour, they can kill them and that’s the biggest thing. I want them to pay attention to the responders and the people who are working on the roadways slow down. Give them some room,” said Koopman.
Koopman believes this new way of alerting drivers is the future of first response.
“It’s only been out for a couple of years, but this is the direction that technology is going, and it’s going to help us be more efficient and work safer out on the roadways,” Koopman said. “I think it’s a big time investment, especially if we can avoid some type of collision because again, any collision would be devastating out on the roadway.”
So the next time you see lights sirens or see an alert on your maps, “do what the book says slow down and pull to the right,” said Koopman.
South Sioux City is not the only Nebraska fire department utilizing this technology. Norfolk’s Fire Division began using the Haas Alert System last spring.
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