How it works
Six automated steps — bounded by a five-minute poll of the public dispatch feed, with every step measured by a synthetic monitoring probe that runs every fifteen minutes, day and night.
The pipeline · end to end
CTECC dispatch
Ingest poll
Geocode + parcel
Territory match
SMS dispatch
Briefing opens
CTECC, the consolidated dispatch center for Austin Fire Department and all 14 Travis County ESDs, dispatches units to a fire. The event is written to the City of Austin's public Real-Time Fire Incidents dataset within seconds.
Source: City of Austin Open Data — wpu4-x69d
A cron poller hits the Open Data API every five minutes. New rows since the last poll are deduplicated against the active incidents table by traffic report ID. No scanner audio, ever — the federal commercial-use ambiguity around scanner-derived data isn't a fight we want to pick.
Polls every 5 minutes · no duplicate alerts
The Open Data feed gives us coordinates, but we re-geocode the address through our mapping provider to fill in any gaps. Then we match that point against the TCAD parcel layer — that's how the Briefing knows which property the truck is being sent to, with the year built, square footage, and appraised value already on the screen.
Each dispatch matched to its TCAD parcel — year, square footage, value
Each subscriber draws their service area inside the county. The routing engine intersects the dispatch location against every active territory, applying severity gates and quiet-hours rules. Synthetic test incidents are filtered out by four independent guards before this stage.
Matches your service area · respects quiet hours and severity filters
A single text — 160 characters, plain ASCII so it never gets split — lands on the contractor's phone over the carrier network. A short 4-character code identifies the Briefing: easy enough to type if the link gets stripped, long enough that nobody can guess it.
One text, 160 characters, never split into multiple messages
Tapping the link opens The Briefing — a mobile-first page with the address, severity badge, unit roster, satellite tile, TCAD profile, and a sticky Mark Responding action. No login. Possession of the SMS link is the auth. Updates flow in as CAD changes propagate, within the five-minute poll window.
Mobile-first · no login required · updates as dispatch changes
What lands on the phone
FireSignal
SMS · short code
FIRE 78751
4413 Avenue G
6 units · 2 min ago
getfiresignal.com/i/9k4r
Reply Y 9k4r = resp / STOP
Delivered · 108 chars · single segment
Exact 108-character alert body. One text, never split.
Austin Open Data · refreshed 2m ago
RESIDENTIAL FIRE
Dispatched 3 min ago · zip 78751
Dispatched 22:14:08 → Alert sent 22:15:51 (1m 43s elapsed)
The Briefing — opens in < 1s, no login required.
After the alert · close the loop
Save any Briefing to your watchlist and move it down the pipeline — lead, contacted, inspected, quoted, won. Put a dollar value on the ones you win and the dashboard shows your real cost per signed job. A free scanner feed tells you a fire happened; it can't tell you which alerts paid for themselves.
Save the Briefing
Move it down the pipeline
Log the job value on a win
See cost per signed job
Two minutes to your first alert