New system will notify drivers when Iowa City Fire Department responds to emergencies

IOWA CITY — The Iowa City Fire Department has installed a new safety system that sends a notification to nearby drivers when the department is active on an emergency scene.

The system, called HAAS Alert Safety Cloud, works with Waze and Apple maps, as well as the built-in navigation systems in certain newer vehicle models. When the Safety Cloud equipped vehicle is activated, anyone within a half-mile radius who has one of those two navigation apps running, or who has a 2018 or newer Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, or RAM vehicle, or a 2024 or newer Volkswagen vehicle, will receive a notification about the approaching emergency vehicle or roadside emergency activity.

“The nice thing about it is there's nothing we have to do to use it. It's connected to our lights and sirens,” Iowa City Battalion Chief Zach Hickman said. “We have an exclusion zone mapped out around our fire stations, so when we turn on our lights to back into our fire stations, it won't activate the system, but anytime that we activate our lights or siren outside of our fire stations, it automatically sends a signal out.”

Hickman said the new system will be especially helpful for the city’s Fire Station Four, which often responds to incidents along Interstate 80.

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“Our biggest area of concern right now is out on the interstate, I-80. It’s dangerous for the civilian, the construction worker, the tow truck driver, the police officer, any emergency responder,” Hickman said. “The interstate is a very dangerous place, and any opportunity that we have to let people know that there’s an emergency vehicle ahead, any extra warning we can provide, the better.”

For the first couple months of use, the system was only installed in the fire department’s command vehicle, which responds to most I-80 emergencies to help with the flow of traffic. On Aug. 27, the department received a new engine for Station Four, which came with Safety Alert pre-installed, but the new apparatus won’t be put into service until late September. The city is also planning on purchasing three more new engines next year, which Hickman said will come with the alert system installed.

The system first went into effect in Iowa City at the end of June. In the month of July there were 170 notifications sent out.

The HAAS Alert company claims that the digital alerts reduce the risk of collision by up to 90 percent, and that drivers who received a notification decrease their speed by an average of 17 percent, but Hickman said in day-to-day use it’s difficult to see exactly how much effect the notifications are having.

“I can’t tell you that I can see a difference. We go out to the interstate a lot and sometimes the cars get over for us, sometimes they don’t,” Hickman said. “The notifications are going out, and I’d like to assume that 170 people that got the notification right on their dash, that they did something to avoid the area. But, you never really can tell.”

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The fire department spent $400 to install the system in the command vehicle, and it came freely installed in the new engine four because of an agreement between HAAS Alert and Pierce Manufacturing, which manufactured the engine. The annual cost to run the Safety Cloud system is less than $400, but Hickman declined to share the exact cost.

“It just so happens that the next few apparatus that we're buying are from Pierce. So, it's going to be zero cost to our city for those additional units, which is even better. We get to have an extra level of safety at little to no cost,” Hickman said.

The Cedar Rapids Fire Department also has been testing the Safety Cloud system on a couple of their engines for the last few months, and is collecting data to determine whether to fully implement the system, according to a spokesperson for the department.

The Osceola Fire Department is the only other agency in Iowa that currently uses the Safety Cloud system, according to the company.

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