We had an incident today that kind of showed a big hole in my local situational awareness. It seems that someone made some kind of chemical attack, and local police and FBI evacuated 13 homes this morning here.

Until I looked in GD, I had no idea about this. No big boom, no emergency vehicles flying by, nothing. I had the radio on this morning when I ran some errands, and didn't hear anything about it then either.

How do you monitor small, local events like this? I am about 2 miles from where the evacuations were, so far enough to be safe this time, but also far enough to not have immediate knowledge of the incident. No point in being ready to get out of dodge in 5 minutes if I find out about incidents like this 5 hours after it happened.


news link for the incident:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,536243,00.html

Wifey works for State Police...

She has their local comms piped into her office and has the teletype just outside in the hall...

She drops me a quick call if a mouse farts and she thinks I would want to know...

local radio around here is pretty good about getting this kind of info out.  

a scanner is a good idea, as well.

I monitor it on a daily and nightly basis.  Heck just this morning there was high speed chase that ended about 4 miles from my house.

TV, internet, am radio, newspaper, and your guys are my sources.

I've been toying with the idea of a scanner though.

As I understand it, with more and more emergency services (police & fire) switching to digital comms, scanners are becoming less useful because they can't pick up the trunked (?) digital signal.  This is coming from a discussion with the head of our PD dispatch center.  I'm not a commo guy so I don't know how to verify that.

Local talk radio covers stuff like this pretty well, and I have it on in the background from daylight till dark.

I don't.

I dispatch for my campus pd so if I'm on duty I'll know about it.  If I'm off the other dispatchers are prety good about letting me know if something big happens close to home.  I've been looking into scanners lately but the idea of bringing work home puts me off.  None of the local agencies use trunking systems so it's not a big deal.  I know you can buy a scanner that will pick up trunked systems but they are pretty expensive.

I don't.



I get frustrated because the local news is typically a solid day or two behind the national news networks, and the story is much more watered down.

That's not necessarily the problem. There are scanners out there that can pick all that up. The problem is when all the digital radios get encrypted.



THAT is when you can't hear anything.



 

scanner
friends with phones
twitter
arfcom
local radio
local tv


in that order.

This. I've found that whatever Radio Station in a city is carrying Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, etc. is usually a top notch News Station that is on the spot anytime something happens in the area. In my area for example that's WFLA (Orlando) or WIOD (Miami). Not much happens in Orlando or Miami wothout those stations knowing. I have to go back an forth between both areas.