S10.E06: Dead Zone

[jewel21]

A major security breach in the city's computer networks forces Firehouse 51's senior leaders to take matters into their own hands. Severide gears up for an arson investigation.

Airdate: 10/27/2021

[iMonrey]

Severide to the rescue once more. Nobody can solve this crime but him! Nobody! Except me, that is, since I figured out last week the sketchy priest obviously had something to do with it.

[CoyoteBlue]

So... they left 911 in the hands of half a dozen untrained firefighters? Why the hell didn't they just have 911 forward dispatch requests to their bullpen? Just... W. T. F. Seriously. 

[iMonrey]

Wow, only 2 replies so far. This really is a dead zone.

Quote

Why the hell didn't they just have 911 forward dispatch requests to their bullpen? Just... W. T. F. Seriously. 

And why weren't the 911 operators relocated to said bullpen to take these calls? 

So is Brett just going to listen to Casey's voicemails and look at his photos week after week? Is she now going to have to remain in limbo while the show waits to see if Jesse Spencer ever comes back? Sort of like how Jesse Spencer spent the last five years waiting for Monica Raymund? Welcome to Jesse's world, Kara Killmer.

When someone asked Severide how long Kidd wold be gone, I literally answered out loud "not long enough." Seriously, this show would benefit from taking a break from all these stupid firehouse romances.

Also, in the real world, Cruz would have ample opportunity for a good night's sleep while on shift. Many a time fire fighters never even leave the station during the 24 hours they are on shift. They sit around watching TV, cooking and eating, playing video games, etc. But that's the real world, and admittedly wouldn't make a very interesting TV show.

[AnnA]

I'm not surprised that there aren't many posts here.  I think people are still out of sorts after Jesse Spencer's sudden departure.  Personally, I think the show will do just fine without him.  I didn't miss him last night and I sure as hell didn't miss Stella.

[judyri]

But the 'old school' approach was fun to watch.  I was just talking to my husband that with GPS on our car dashboard it's great, but I kind of miss the days of having to figure out the exits on a real map on my lap.  It was fun trying to figure out the best route together.  This generation is going to literally have zero navigation skills.

[Dowel Jones]

So, they're telling me that between two engines on the b-ball call, there wasn't one sawzsall or even a hacksaw?  They had to wait for a truck?

The 911 scenario was absurd. 98 stations, probably close to a million calls per year (prorated down to a day that's still a hella big load) and you dump it on less than 10 untrained firefighters?  And unstaff the bestest fire house in the city at the same time?  Has anyone heard of B and C shifts?  Maybe, you know, call in some off duty firefighters.  I did like that they gave props to the old guys (Hermann/Mouch) for coming up with an alternate system.  Not the best, though.  All quarters and dimes look the same.

I swear Boden could run for governor and he'd still be working out of Station 51.  I wonder whatever happened to the admin staff that was always in the background, save for the poor actress that passed away.  It does occur to me, though, that if Eamonn Walker wants some time off, they can always write him out for a few episodes as taking care of district business.

OFI lieutenant didn't waste any time hitting on Severide, did she?

[NJRadioGuy]

I'm dyin' (of laughter) here with that call center plot. OMFG. I get the drama they were trying to portray, but sweet baby Jeebus they couldn't have screwed this up more if they tried. As DJ said, they'd need 40 or 50 call takers and a phone switching network as big as the firehouse in the basement at the very least, reference for every intersection in the city on file, remote lines to the towers and a lot of other shit besides.

Phone banks at the FAO (fire alarm office) would still work, since they're all hardwired. CAD goes down regularly in a lot of places and it's no big deal since it's all part of training. Intake might need runners to move paper tickets to over-the-air dispatchers rather than via keyboards. There will be a location cross-reference of some kind (FDNY uses box numbers that refer to old "pull in case of fire" telegraph boxes that used to exist everywhere, and still do in some places--and every city will have some kind of similar reference). There will be a printed reference of who will be the first due companies, first alarm response, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Radios will still work (Chicago is on an digital P-25 UHF repeater system, but it's not trunked. Main is on 477.7875 MHz for any other radio geeks out there).

So a call comes in, an intake caller will use written procedures (that they will have to know in order to be on the floor), prepare a ticket with location, someone will look up the location and hand the ticket off, the voice alarm dispatcher will have the box ticket and tone out the firehouses (yes, with a human voice instead of the BionicB*tch™ as "she" was known), and then the air dispatchers will take it from there as they always do. FDNY and Toronto Fire Department used to use conveyor belts for punch-card size tickets, between the phone banks and the OTA dispatchers as an example.

There's more than Engines, Ladders, Squads, and Ambulances, so coins are ridiculous. What about Battallion Chiefs, district chiefs and other brass, hose tenders, air supply units, lighting rigs, airport crash tenders, etc? Chopped Liver? I remember boards with companies in lights. Red is on scene or OOS, white is enroute, Green is in quarters. the OTA dispatcher knows where his or her companies are because they're not morons. I grew up with this stuff. But yes, I get why they did this, and it was a nice little story, just so beyond the realm of possible as to be laughable.

[Dowel Jones]

It would have been a lot better, and funnier, if they had somehow accumulated enough Monopoly pieces to indicate units. 

Sylvie:  "Ooh, I get to be the racecar."  Boden:  "I will be the top hat."  And so on.

[Ohiopirate02]

13 hours ago, NJRadioGuy said:

I'm dyin' (of laughter) here with that call center plot. OMFG. I get the drama they were trying to portray, but sweet baby Jeebus they couldn't have screwed this up more if they tried. As DJ said, they'd need 40 or 50 call takers and a phone switching network as big as the firehouse in the basement at the very least, reference for every intersection in the city on file, remote lines to the towers and a lot of other shit besides.

Phone banks at the FAO (fire alarm office) would still work, since they're all hardwired. CAD goes down regularly in a lot of places and it's no big deal since it's all part of training. Intake might need runners to move paper tickets to over-the-air dispatchers rather than via keyboards. There will be a location cross-reference of some kind (FDNY uses box numbers that refer to old "pull in case of fire" telegraph boxes that used to exist everywhere, and still do in some places--and every city will have some kind of similar reference). There will be a printed reference of who will be the first due companies, first alarm response, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Radios will still work (Chicago is on an digital P-25 UHF repeater system, but it's not trunked. Main is on 477.7875 MHz for any other radio geeks out there).

So a call comes in, an intake caller will use written procedures (that they will have to know in order to be on the floor), prepare a ticket with location, someone will look up the location and hand the ticket off, the voice alarm dispatcher will have the box ticket and tone out the firehouses (yes, with a human voice instead of the BionicB*tch™ as "she" was known), and then the air dispatchers will take it from there as they always do. FDNY and Toronto Fire Department used to use conveyor belts for punch-card size tickets, between the phone banks and the OTA dispatchers as an example.

There's more than Engines, Ladders, Squads, and Ambulances, so coins are ridiculous. What about Battallion Chiefs, district chiefs and other brass, hose tenders, air supply units, lighting rigs, airport crash tenders, etc? Chopped Liver? I remember boards with companies in lights. Red is on scene or OOS, white is enroute, Green is in quarters. the OTA dispatcher knows where his or her companies are because they're not morons. I grew up with this stuff. But yes, I get why they did this, and it was a nice little story, just so beyond the realm of possible as to be laughable.

The main city in my county had a ransomware attack back in 2019.  While the city lost it's computers, they never lost their 9-1-1 system.  This whole plot was too farfetched for it to be believable.  I really laughed at it being resolved in a single shift.  It took 2 weeks for the city where I lived to get every computer on their system fixed because they were never going to pay the ransom.  Oh, and the ransomware ended up on the city's servers because someone working at a firehouse downloaded a movie off of a torrent site.

[NJRadioGuy]

1 hour ago, Ohiopirate02 said:

The main city in my county had a ransomware attack back in 2019.  While the city lost it's computers, they never lost their 9-1-1 system.  This whole plot was too farfetched for it to be believable.  I really laughed at it being resolved in a single shift.  It took 2 weeks for the city where I lived to get every computer on their system fixed because they were never going to pay the ransom.  Oh, and the ransomware ended up on the city's servers because someone working at a firehouse downloaded a movie off of a torrent site.

Bet they won't do that again, wherever they work next, that is.

Tech mumbo-jumbo to follow--skip if you don't care: 9-1-1 incoming lines and switches are hardened by the telco. They can't be affected by malware, although a strategically-placed backhoe can cause utter mayhem until it's repaired. Dispatchers are trained up the wazoo on what happens if (when!) CAD goes down, and in many older parts of the country that happens more often than you'd think. But again, it's a great big nothingburger since everybody qualified on the floor knows what to do when it happens.

Likewise, radio systems are hardened against pretty much anything, including mains power failures (generators with backup fuel supplies), multiple sites in case a tower fails, etc. The only weak link is old analog radio systems that can be maliciously interfered with by idiots with $25 walkie-talkies that they bought off Amazon. NYPD, CPD, and LAFD learned that lesson. Trunked encrypted radio systems will be in place in NY within a few years so that never happens again.

I still love the way the old telegraph machines worked. Pull the little lever and a clock-like spring mechanism turns a signal on-and-off in the pattern of the box's number. So if you pull box 425 the alarm office (or the local firehouse) would hear four bells, two bells, and five bells, sent twice. They'd look up their cards and see that box 425 was at Main and Elm, and send a first alarm response to the box, where they'd expect to meet the person or see the fire. This is 100+ years ago, and there are still working boxes in many places!

To me, the best form of fire dispatching was when FD had sworn (often restricted-duty) firefighters, and had only fire calls sent to them by 9-1-1 intake. Many of those veterans knew every street, alleyway, hydrant, and other bits of infrastructure in the city. Like Mouch did when he heard the bad address they'd just know listening to an address if it was right, where to send first due, second due, third due, etc for optimal positioning. I'm betting in most places that's all gone now. You have one or two dispatch centers for a city or even a county in many places with intake callers making near-minimum wage. They talk to the public and read scripts for every conceivable emergency, and from their keyboards they forward calls to the air dispatcher who handles the radio traffic. Some call centers have utterly useless intake call takers (see that bit about near-minimum wage). Give them a bad address and they'll argue with the caller about where they are. I've had to report things like MVAs on a few occasions in NYC and one time I just gave up they were so bad. Others, especially state PD call-takers are top notch. But in an urban FD setting, you really want the guys behind phones and at the radio consoles to be firefighters who have The Knowledge.

[AnnA]

The 911 scenes may not have been technically correct but I enjoyed them.    I enjoyed the whole episode except for the repeated mention of the cat.  

[Dowel Jones]

Wouldn't it have a hoot if Casey had been behind the ransomware hack?  CFD pays the anonymous hackers off in bitcoin, Casey 'retires' to Oregon, and Brett soon after.

[TM101]

So assuming a scene is incoming with this Arson chick making a move on Severide?

”Kidd won’t be back for a couple weeks or so”

”Oh if you want to grab a drink at Mollies or anywhere else”

[Court]

10 hours ago, TM101 said:

So assuming a scene is incoming with this Arson chick making a move on Severide?

”Kidd won’t be back for a couple weeks or so”

”Oh if you want to grab a drink at Mollies or anywhere else”

I mean she already made a move on last time he went to the arson dept.