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The fire department jurisdiction map used by the Shelby County 911 Center shows how complicated the the U.S. 280 corridor can be for first responders. Looking more like a heavily gerrymander congressional map than a plan to douse flames, the lines reflect how annexations carved up the land. But don't worry. If you need a fire put out, someone will show up. It just might be a different someone depending on the day, time and exact location of the flame.
The mix of municipal and jurisdictional lines isn’t just confusing for homeowners and business owners; it complicates things for first responders and the people responsible for getting the correct first responders to the scene.
“It’s crazy,” said Alan Campbell, executive director of Shelby County 911, which is responsible for dispatching the correct units to the correct places. “There are places in that 280 area where an agency will take one lane but not the other lane. So you’ve got places over there where it may be Hoover and the [Shelby County] Sheriff’s Office, but Hoover only takes the lane going towards Birmingham and not the lane going the other direction.”
Capt. Mark Bishop, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, said at times dispatch will send multiple agencies to the scene of an accident along U.S. 280 if there isn’t 100% clarity on where it is.
“If it’s anywhere remotely close to being in one jurisdiction or the other, they’re more than likely going to dispatch both agencies,” Bishop said. “And that increases the likelihood that, at the very least, that we get somebody to you as soon as possible, and then we can work through the details of who’s the primary investigative agency after that.”
Campbell said dispatchers try to get as much information as possible along the corridor to determine which agency has jurisdiction for a call. Because of the interwoven municipal lines, that is not always easy.
“Instead of we’re looking at a whole city, we’re looking at it at a parcel level, or all the way down to single pieces of property,” Campbell said. “So you can have a call come in at the Arby’s on 280, and that’s going to be the Sheriff’s Office and Cahaba Valley Fire, but at the office building right next door to it, that’s going to be Birmingham police and Birmingham fire [departments], so it comes right down to that level.
Campbell said while some areas can be tricky to know which agency to dispatch, they’re able to coordinate the calls with all of the agencies that work the U.S. 280 corridor to get them to the right location.
“There’s nothing magical about it,” Campbell said. “We have a really good map, and those calls come in, and we put them where they are on our really good map, and we notify the right agencies. But, everybody on that 280 corridor works really well together.”
The Shelby County 911 center handles all calls in Shelby County. Plus, Campbell said, they have contracts to handle the calls from Homewood, Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills. Before the 1980s, there weren’t as many agencies in north Shelby County. Vestavia Hills was confined to west of U.S. 280. As was Hoover.
“It just made sense for us to have all three of them because now we don’t have it like before where they had three centers and they had to transfer the calls between the three,” Campbell said. “Now they’re all in the same room, so having them consolidated in one space makes it better for them, and we work with those agencies just across the county line, so it works for us.”
