Breaking Incidents For Canadian Provinces

[scannerboy01]

Has there been thought about having a Breaking Incidents section of the forums for the Canadian provinces? The only Canadian province that has Breaking Incidents is Ontario. The Breaking Incidents section would be useful to alert people to things such as Amber Alerts, major structure fires, chemical releases, severe weather, etc. Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

[WayneH]

Get more people behind it and I'll add where applicable. I don't want to create the forums and then them never get used.

 

[scannerboy01]

Okay. Would it be possible to post in the Prairies forums and not punished for cross posting or would you be able to move this thread to the appropriate area?

 

[WayneH]

Go ahead and post a thread over there. Provide a link to this thread so I only have to watch this one.

 

[omrail]

if it was there and i know of some thing Breaking i would use it. do we need it i don't know

 

[KF6DGN]

My son goes to school at Simon Frazier in Burnaby BC, since I was interested in the area I follow @ScanBC on Twitter. They will tweet breaking news events. You can find out more about them at scanbc.com. A lot of the RCMP Public Relations folks have Twitter accounts and tweet about active incidents.

David

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

Interesting idea, but I wonder how well it would get the word out to people when there is a breaking incident? For real time alerts a lot of people use services such as Incident Page Network. This has the advantage of sending the alert to a mobile device or email for instant notification instead of having to keep an eye on a forum that may be visited a few times a week.

At least here in the Edmonton area, there are 6 or 7 of us that are sending out alerts on IPN. I'm not sure how many people subscribe to the service but I find it to be of value as I can be notified if I happen to be away from the radio.

 

[scannerboy01]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Not many people might want to pay for a subscription, but here they can receice alerts for free. Also, this wouldn't be for major cities only. Should an incident take place in a small town, a local listener could put it on here before the major news agencies report on it.

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

IPN is free as long as a person is willing to send out a few alerts per month. Also if your town isn't listed, just send an email to their support and they will add it for you. If a person is going to be posting an alert somewhere, they may as well get something in return for their effort. IPN gives dispatcher reward points. Even though the reward is small, it's still something that adds up after a while.

 

[scannerboy01]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

The same thing could be said about the breaking incidents in the US forums that they could use IPN.

 

[WayneH]

Generally the Incidents forums serve as more of a discussion area for an event and less for up to date reporting on an incident. Being the nature of forums they really aren't means for real-time information reporting.

 

[scannerboy01]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Then maybe it would make sense for IPN to be used for alerting and there could be discussion of the incident in the incidents forum.

 

[MtnBiker2005]

Take a look at one of the busiest "Breaking News" area. It's running very well.

Colorado Incidents and Breaking News
http://forums.radioreference.com/colorado-incidents-breaking-news/

 

[scannerboy01]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

That would be exactly like what I'd like to see. I'd hope that common sense is used to not post very sensitive things during the incident for police officer safety. Just basic things should be posted at the start of the event such as location and type of incident.