Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service
An Internationally Accredited Public Safety Agency
Tom Carr, Fire Chief Pete Piringer, Public Information Officer
Executive Office Building, 101 Monroe Street, 12th Floor, Rockville,
Maryland, 20850
Phone: 240.777.2474 – Media Hotline – 240.777.2442
IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 12, 2007
National Capital Region First Responders Get New Numbers
Montgomery and Prince George’s County Implement Regional Numbering
System
Beginning on Monday, October 15, 2007 the first phase of the
Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) unit numbering
system for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service (MCFRS) and
the Prince George’s County Fire/Emergency Medical Services Department
(PGFD) will be implemented. This transition is in compliance with the
National Capital Region (NCR) Council of Governments (COG)
Apparatus/Unit renumbering. This system is based on the assignment of
an individual numeric jurisdictional identifier for each major
geographic jurisdiction within MWCOG.
Traditional identification of fire/EMS units, command officers, and
support personnel will be changed over a period of the next few weeks
and months throughout the region. Soon all Montgomery County fire,
rescue and EMS units will identify themselves with our jurisdictional
identifier of “7”. All Prince George’s County Fire/EMS units will
utilize jurisdictional identifier of “8”.
2 – New Numbers
For example, the paramedic (ALS) unit that responds out of Silver
Spring Fire Station 1 which used to be identified as Medic 19,
starting Monday, that same unit will use the radio identifier
Medic701, seven (7) related to Montgomery County and oh-one (01)
associated with fire station #1. While at the same time, the basic
life support (BLS) ambulance from the same station, formerly known as
Ambulance 18, will be identified as Ambulance701.
While the initial change may sound confusing, the NCR MWCOG
renumbering system will assist in the inter-operational capabilities
and regional response of units dispatched outside of their
jurisdictions and assist incident commanders in readily identifying
out of county apparatus that respond mutual aid into Montgomery County
(7), Prince Georges (8), the District of Columbia (0) and Northern
Virginia. The jurisdictional identifiers are also used to identify
the ‘trunked’ radio resources assigned to each jurisdiction in the
radios. The agencies within MWCOG share programming across the
‘trunked’ radio systems in the region to facilitate interoperability
and these identifiers are used to facilitate identification of, and
navigation to, those resources in the mobile and portable radios.
3 – New Numbers
Unit numbering is based on the assignment of numeric jurisdictional
identifiers to each major political jurisdiction within MWCOG. These
assignments are as follows:
0 - Washington, DC
1 - Arlington County
2 - City of Alexandria
3 - Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority
4 - Fairfax County
5 - Prince William County
6 - Loudoun County
7 - Montgomery County
8 - Prince George's County
9 - Frederick County
Within Montgomery County, the MWCOG numbering will be implemented in
two (2) phases, the first of which begins Monday, October 15, 2007 to
include all first response units from all local fire and rescue
stations and Duty Operations Chief (DOC) level and operations
personnel under the DOC. Within the next six (6) months all other
staff and support units (and personnel) will be introduced into the
regional numbering scheme.
