The Montgomery County Emergency Service District #3, located about 50 miles north of Houston and just south of Lake Conroe in Montgomery County, Texas, provides fire suppression and medical first responder services to the surrounding 50 square miles. Our district employs 55 full-time, state-certified firefighters, and encompass four fire stations, an administration office, a logistics center, and a live-fire training facility. These facilities are essential to ensuring that our emergency response team is prepared for all sorts of crises, from house fires to severe weather disasters.
Our county experiences all types of severe weather year round that can impact community safety, like flash flooding, extreme heat, and even freezing temperatures. To supplement our community response strategies during environmental crises and get a jump on incoming weather situations, our emergency responders opted to acquire a professional weather station.
We received our AcuRite Atlas® stations in August 2021; we installed one of the wireless weather stations at Fire Station 31 and another on top of our Training & Logistics facility. Both weather stations communicate wirelessly with the HD displays, located just inside each facility. We have placed them there so that we can monitor weather conditions — like heat index, rainfall, and lightning strike proximity — in real time when the firefighters are outside training. By keeping a close eye on the environment we can respond to dangerous weather quickly with extra breaks or even just transferring activities indoors.
The lightning detection feature is one thing we really like about our weather station; our firefighters use our training facility regularly, and with the continuous updates we are able to receive timely notifications when there is lightning nearby. This allows us to suspend any training and move our firefighters to shelter when dangerous strikes are near.
Another great feature is that we are able to share the live data from our weather stations so we can keep our dispatch center, neighboring departments, and our staff in the weather loop. In the case of an emergency incident or natural disaster, we are able to look at the live data from two different locations in our district. During Hurricane Nicholas in September 2021, we were able to consistently monitor wind speeds and rainfall amounts to stay up to date on possible crises areas.
It's especially helpful in our weather monitoring through My AcuRite® to have access to our historical weather data. Through analyzing daily to annual weather data, we're able to understand temperature trends and extremes and record rainfall events and severe storms that affected our community and our response operations.
We are very excited to now have AcuRite weather stations to help us monitor our weather conditions, as this will not only help our Fire Department during emergency incidents and disasters but also all of our neighbors in the community who are able to access our live weather data available on our Weather Underground page.