Fire Drill at Richmond Communications?

[trainman111]

A few seconds ago, 4 tones sounded on the City Of Richmond's TG 34848 (RFD Announcement) and then a female came across and said "All personnel evacuate the building immediately, all personnel evacuate the building immediately". The tones and female repeated three times. I'm assuming the place they were evacuating was the comm center but I'm not sure. No further traffic was heard. Does anyone know what this might have been?

 

[John]

Were there any fires or training going on at the same time? I expect it wasn't for evacuating the dispatch center but more than likely was a multi-select or Announcement Talkgroup transmission meant for a fireground operation. Either real or training. The NFPA requires every department to have a policy in place to annoucement building evacuations over the radio and it is supposed to be accompanied by a unique evacuation tone. Some departments with many channels/talkgroups, will make this announcement on many channels at the same time uding either multi-select or ATG. That way anyone on the fireground will hear it no matter what channel they may be on.

John

 

[W4BOZ]

Around 3:30, I saw a large amount of smoke coming from the Oregon Hill area. Turns out it was this:
NBC12 News, Weather Sports, Traffic, and Programming Guide for Richmond, VA | 2-alarm fire near VCU displaces 9

Ops were on Tac 2 for the most part and things got relatively bad from the sound of it with part of the structure (a stairwell) collapsing. Might have been related...

 

[adwcbw]

Things did get bad and IC had comms set off the evac tones.

Andy

 

[trainman111]

Well that make sense. I knew that the 2 alarm fire was going on at the time of the "announcement", I just didn't realize they were related. Thanks for the help guys!

 

[n4jri]

A few seconds ago, 4 tones sounded on the City Of Richmond's TG 34848 (RFD Announcement) and then a female came across and said "All personnel evacuate the building immediately, all personnel evacuate the building immediately". The tones and female repeated three times. I'm assuming the place they were evacuating was the comm center but I'm not sure. No further traffic was heard. Does anyone know what this might have been?

Your post is labeled for 8:15p, but I believe that I heard this same thing quite a bit later. It was an apartment fire on Broad Rock Rd, and just as Andy said the on-scene commander came up on TAC-2 and asked the dispatcher to call for evacuation. I didn't catch the actual call, but will set the ATG to priority now that I know how it was done. Thanks for catching that and reporting it.

73/Allen (N4JRI)