ROSS National Automated Dispatching Not Working Well For CalFire

National system not meeting Cal Fire's needs, director says

With another fire season bearing down on Southern California, the national system used to order additional firefighters and equipment during a fire siege is not meeting the needs of California, its largest user.

Cal Fire Director Ruben Grijalva said delays in the automated dispatching system known as ROSS made it difficult to know where firefighters and equipment were deployed in October when 23 wildland fires simultaneously blazed across Southern California, including the mountain communities of San Bernardino County.

Local fire bosses, frustrated by frequent hardware glitches and delays in the federal Resource Ordering and Status System, began bypassing ROSS and making direct requests for firefighters and equipment from other agencies, Grijalva said.

It sometimes took up to 12 hours for deployments to get conveyed to fire commanders, and the confusion complicated efforts on the ground, Grijalva said.

"At command and control you would think they were in Orange County and they were in San Diego County," said Grijalva, who has begun meeting with federal lawmakers to share his concerns.

Federal officials say they are working to identify shortcomings and solutions in ROSS, which tracks and dispatches the closest available firefighters and equipment when local units are overwhelmed.

But a report from a wildland safety organization after the October firestorm said users of ROSS complained that it "doesn't seem to be designed to handle the high capacity of orders for events like this."

After two years of using ROSS, Cal Fire officials said that if problems aren't fixed soon, they will be forced to phase out of the system and build a new network that serves the fire-prone state.

"My concern is that after two years it is not serving California," Grijalva said.

The National Wildland Coordinating Group, a panel of federal agencies that oversees ROSS, has been using the system for about a decade.

It is used by about 400 regional emergency operations and dispatch centers across the country. ROSS replaced the manual pencil-and-paper ordering system used by many agencies just a few decades ago and tracks costs as they are incurred. Since its inception, the Internet-based system has cost taxpayers about $69 million.

Federal fire officials pressed Cal Fire to transition to ROSS to create a seamless national program for delivering personnel and equipment more swiftly to large-scale events, Grijalva said....

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Source: The Press-Enterprise
10:00 PM PDT on Monday, May 19, 2008
By KIMBERLY TRONE