Satellite and Area Maps of Fire Boxes in Boston
Posted: Sun, 11 Jan 2009, 11:34:26, GMT | 1571 views | Commented on: Friday, May 29, 2009 Share
How many times have you been listening to your police/fire scanner and wish you could visualize the area in which an incident was taking place? If you're like me, this happens frequently. (And if you're not like me, you should listen to the police/fire more often.. it's quite interesting! Although, not in the UK where it's illegal to do so..)
The Boston area has a long tradition of "sparking" as they call it. The over-simplified version of it is that you meet up with friends, grab some Dunkin Donuts coffee to keep you warm, and go hang out in an unofficial fairly central place in Boston - Eddie Everett Square in South Boston. From there, you can drive to most of the hot spots fairly quickly. There's a close connection between the socio-economic condition of a neighborhood and its rate of fires / shootings / other serious things - and this area is central to them all. I do realize this sounds a bit strange to those who aren't familiar with the concept. But this isn't a hobby that five or ten people weirdly participate in - there are literally thousands of people on the East Coast that do this. To put this in context, when I lived in Boston, I was a member of one of the "associations" that facilitated sparking, ranging from tips and tricks to a full-blown radio system for ourselves in the event someone needed help. For example, the group purchased several radio repeaters, rented space on tall buildings in the area (like the Prudential, John Hancock, etc) and individual members could communicate to other members about an incident. Was it worth coming out to the fire? Was it almost out or did it look like it would spread? Which roads were shut and how was the best way to get there using an alternative route? And - as it happened on occasion - "Get me help here quickly". This was back before mobile phones were everywhere and on every person, so it was quite comforting to know that should I need help, there were about 50 people actively ready to help, whether that was calling 911 for me or racing to the scene to help me directly. It never hurt that many of the people participating in this were public safety officials themselves who were off duty. Many were firefighters, but just as many were state cops, local police. To illustrate the seriousness with which this is taken, here is a copy of the Metro Radio System ("M.R.S.") Operating Procedures that outline how members should and should not use the system. Ahh.. brings back memories of a "10-30 Code 1". You can go look it up :)
In any case, that's all background for the real point of my post. Boston, like some other older cities in the US, have a system of outdoor emergency pull stations - "fire boxes". Each fire box has a unique number that identifies its specific location. In the days before telephones in every house and mobile phone everywhere, they were the quickest manner in which someone could summon the fire department to the area. They are still used today around Boston, and from time to time, prove their unique usefulness (such as a massive phone outage where you can't call 911, or an outage at the 911 control center, etc). Fire boxes are typically spring-loaded and literally "tap" out the box location at the fire alarm center. Due to the way the boxes are numbered, one can tell with good accuracy the area of the box. For example, boxes numbered in the 2800s would typically be in the West Roxbury area. In a city like Boston where the street names don't immediately designate an area, having a box reference is very useful. Knowing there's a fire on Washington Street isn't too useful when there are 15 Washington Streets that span the entire city. But knowing there's a fire near box 1271 - now that tells me which Washington Street we're talking about.
What I've always missed having is an easy way to visualize the area of a fire box. Boston Fire always dispatches units to an address and says which fire box is closest to the incident. I've always wished there was an easy way for me to visualize the location of the fire box in context of what else is around there. What I created recently is the beginning of the solution I want! BostonFireBox.com allows a user to type in a specific Fire Box and the website will pull up several views of the fire box's area - the street view for assistance navigating to the location, as well as four increasingly zoomed-in satellite pictures of the fire box. So from only the fire box number itself, you can now find out its address, its lat/lon coordinates, see the immediate area around the fire box - and immediately be able to visualize the context of the incident. I've made sure that each fire box reference can also be hard-linked to (ie you can link directly to a fire box and don't always have to enter its number).
In order to do this, I pulled a few different pieces of information together. First, I sourced a list of all fire box locations in Boston. This is fairly widely available, although I received some nice help from Elliot, who is the owner of Emba's Fire Page. Once I had the raw addresses, they all had to be formatted into a common format. For example, some addresses would say "Behind the hospital building at Ten Main Street." While that's fine if you're reading the location, in order to properly map the address, I had to scrub about 3800 addresses and get them into the format similar to "10 Main Street" and make a comment associated with that address to say "behind the hospital." I started doing this manually and decided it was more effective to outsource the work, so I posted a detailed bid on GetAFreelancer.com with what I wanted (basically, a person to take my Excel spreadsheet and manually format each address, separating it into the core address and into a notes field for additional info). I got several bids ranging from $20 to $200 and I selected a person who was $80, had good feedback from prior buyers, and was willing to do all the work within one day. Once I got the data back, I fed it into a geo-encoding webservice that accepts an address and returns the lat/lon coordinates. Once I had that, I build a simple website and database back-end, which associates the lat/lon with the box number. When a user requests a specific box, the website retrieves the information and then calls into Google's map APIs to display several variations of maps for that specific lat/lon combination. I also built in an easy way for users to "flag" a map as incorrect for me to review, because I'm sure not all 3800 locations fully encoded properly.
So now that you're clearly super interested in this, try it out! The first step is to start listening to the Boston Fire Department - which you can do so here at the free Windows Media Boston Fire Radio channel. And then when you hear the fire department respond to an incident, listen for the ".. nearest box is .." and go to my Map Boston Fire Box website, type in the box number, and enjoy!
Jim C. C277 (151.203.60.184) from Ashland MA says: This is a great site. I also enjoy the link to listen to BFD as well. (posted Friday, May 29, 2009)
Car 36 writes: When we hung out at "Eddie Everett" and a fire call came in it was like demolition derby getting out of the parking lot and a car chase from the Blues Brothers movie going to the fire! Good times. (posted Tuesday, January 13, 2009)