Muncie, Indiana Discovers Email

Sometimes I get tired of writing about all the ways email fails. It’s nice, now and then, to write about something a little different. This is a case of email being used to actually solve a fail.

photo by flickr user House of Sims

Recently the city of Muncie, Indiana discovered a better way to transport their weekly maintenance reports from their various fire stations to the Fire Chief’s office at City Hall. Seems on-duty fire fighters had been delivering the reports by fire truck, with a cost of about $1500 PER TRIP. With over 6,000 trips made in 2008, this method of document delivery cost the city more than $9 MILLION last year alone.
Muncie Mayor Sharon McShurley is one forward thinking public official, though, because this practice is about to be replaced by  something so groundbreaking other municipalities are just bound to follow.

McShurley told Fire Chief Sean Burcham recently to order equipment that would allow firefighters to transmit maintenance, training and other reports electronically to the chief’s office, now at City Hall, instead of having on-duty firefighters deliver paperwork by fire truck.

Not only do the firefighters need to be trained in the use of email, but they’ll also be getting scanners so the reports they had been filling out by hand will be turned into digital documents for the transfer.

Imagine!

What’s next? Some kind of crazy machine that will let them create their weekly maintenance reports digitally, so they won’t even need the scanner or to write the reports up by hand? I mean, my gosh, what a wonderful futuristic world it would be if that kind of technology were to come along!

If I lived in Muncie, I’d sure be glad that this new-fangled technology was coming to the fire department. If you think about it — in the few years since Thunder, Stompy, Buddy, and Steve (the draft horses who used to pull the fire trucks) retired, so much has changed.

And now fire trucks and firefighters won’t be tied up delivering paperwork instead of, oh, I don’t know… being available in case of an emergency.