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The Perth Amboy Fire Department is a combination fire department comprised of 56 Career and 90 Volunteer firefighters. Responding to more than 2,500 calls per year, it was extremely difficult to keep accurate track of the attendance of our volunteer members, which directly affected an end of the year stipend issued to members based on their annual participation. After alarms, attendance sheets were completed by the members responding and submitted for appropriate credit. This highly unsecured system was time consuming to tabulate each month, and required more than 30 man hours to manually compile end of the year participation data.

The introduction of the “SPARK” program has allowed the department to establish a more reliable and secure attendance record, while at the same time greatly reducing the number of hours that have to be spent to manually track response statistics.

Additionally, the use of the Bar Code scanner allows for the tracking of firefighters directly on the emergency scene and download the members’ attendance records into the program once the incident has been completed. This also serves as an effective way for the department to maintain on-scene personnel accountability during long term incidents. Members, most of which respond to an incident in their personal vehicles, have the ability to scan in to record their arrival, and scan out to document when they have left the scene.

Overall the “SPARK” program has increased the department’s efficiency in accurately and securely tracking the participation level of our Volunteer members, while saving valuable administrative time which had been wasted manually tabulating more than 2,500 incident responses for 90 members – You do the math! Better yet, let “SPARK” do the math, because there are more important things to do in the fire service than count numbers!

Captain David Volk

Perth Amboy Fire Department