Its been a while since i’ve visited this great Kirupa community but y’all were a great help when I needed it. Well here I am in need of help again. Here’s the skinny. I am a Deputy Sheriff for Dallas County assigned to the traffic division. We respond to accidents inside the City of Dallas and are dispatched to them only after they have taken the time to go input them into a terminal designed specifically to communicate with our county dispatchers. Once our dispatchers get the call which takes an unknown amount of time they dispatch us by radio. the problem is that we don’t get dispatched for 10-15 minutes after the fire department does. It seems the City fire department is getting the call and arriving at the scene much earlier than we are. typically we are already in the area of the accident while the fire department jumps in their trucks and leaves their station and still has to wait for us to arrive. The City has a webite that lists all active calls and refreshes every 10 seconds or so. here is the link (http://www.dallasfirerescue.com/fadata/fdindex.html) The information on this website is extremely fast and I believe the calls are placed on the page at the same moment that the city fire department gets the call. Some of us have been able to catch accidents on the page well before our dispatch ever get the call from the City but we would only be lucky to look at it at just the right moment and pick out the accident call amongst all the other various medical/fire calls that we don’t respond to. What I am interested to know is if its possible to write a software to search this page every time it refreshes (or in intervals close to the refresh times) for key words that would identify when an accident on certain roadways showed up on the list. If an accident on a specified freeway did show up on the list it should alert somehow… either by audible signal or visual cue or both. If anyone has some idea of how to tackle this monster, your help would be greatly appreciated. I am trying to take the initiative to help improve this issue.
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Thanks Kirupa community!