Translating the Boston_Fire Twitter feed
By adamg - 3/19/09 - 3:51 pm
Shortly after 3 p.m., Boston Fire tweeted:
Report on Box 3547: Confirmed Building Fire, L6 reports heavy fire on roof, 1 line charged at this time
Which is a little meaningless unless you happen to be either right there or in possession of a list of Boston fire boxes.
Firebufffeed to the rescue: Whoever runs that does have a list of Boston fire boxes and translates the above to: a three-story apartment building at 563-565 Norfolk St. (in Mattapan).
Comments
Still plenty of ciphers to
Still plenty of ciphers to decipher, though:
K/D?
O/H?
ACW?
IAO?
Tx in arrest to BI? (Perhaps "patient/victim transported in cardiac arrest to Beth Israel")?
Translations
K/D: "Knocked Down" - Visible fire is extinguished
O/H: "Overhauling" - Ripping down ceilings and walls (etc) and checking for hidden fire
I need to look at the feed to get context on the other ones...
UPDATE: On the train so I could look at the tweets:
IAO: "In the Area Of" - Approximate location.
ACW I have no clue about. :|
Another one you may see:
OIC: "Officer In Charge" - Officer who's in command.
Thanks for the info, and no
Thanks for the info, and no offense intended to firebuffed or RightSaidRed-- it's a nifty feed. I had a guess about K/D, never would have thought of "overhauling." A couple of others I missed earlier: "ALS" (ambulance service?) and "bone fire" (?!).
ACW is a stumpah! All Companies Working? Assistance Can Wait?
Google
How about ACW = All Companies Working?
A quick search found this site
Acronyms site
Woo-hoo! Lucky guess. That
Woo-hoo! Lucky guess. That same site leads me to believe that ALS=Advanced Life Support.
Tweaking
The fire tweets are being tweaked as it is new, so apologies for all the fire department jargon on the last few.
Tweets for building fires will be in the following format, to accommodate both fire department personnel etc. who know what the boxes and districts mean, and for the public who just want to know where the fire or reported building fire is:
Reported Building Fire: Box XXXX (Box Location & District)
Address: Street address & neighborhood
Updates on fires will now include street address and neighborhood
"All out" means the fire is out, this will be explained at the end of an "all out" tweet
Updates will be as simple to read as possible, if any special terms or codes are used those should be explained as well
Twitter fan perplexed
Does a fire department really need to tweet its comings and goings, especially in a manner most people won't understand. Unless this is an automated message it seems like a world class waste of time.
I like it this way.
I like seeing how fire and police handle calls and I like seeing them do it in their own vernacular. Maybe a glossary would be nice, but I much prefer this to any sort of Public Facing Announcements with press release-friendly language.
There are personal reasons for this as well. My father was a firefighter and always had a scanner running when he was in the house, so this is a little throwback for me (listening to the updates, though here we don't have to listen to the tone-outs.)
A tweet that is skimpy and
A tweet that is skimpy and only half-intelligible? I thought that was the whole point.
(whoops.)
(meant to reply to someone else's thread with this. M/B. C/O.)
And as mentioned in the other thread ...
Boston_Fire is not the official BFD Twitter feed. This is (and right now it consists of exactly one update, letting us know that this is not the official feed).
Is there nothing the Web can't do?
Looky here: Somebody's up and built a Web site that lets you type in a Boston fire box number and then get back a map showing its location.
Thanks, Matthew!