Fire Dept. Wants Friends, Followers, Tweets

Next time you hear the high pitched wail of fire and rescue equipment speeding through your neighborhood, you might want to check out the Prince George's County Fire and Emergency Medical Services blog. 

Or Twitter feed. 

Or YouTube channel.

Or Facebook page. 

That's the message from county fire and rescue officials, who earlier this week sent out an email reminding readers that there are many ways to find out what's going on with local emergency services. 

"The Prince George’s County Fire/Emergency Medical Services Department maintains a news blog so that members of the community, media, Fire/EMS Department personnel and anyone that may be interested in the activity of the Department can easily locate a variety of stories and incident involving the Department," wrote Mark Brady, public information officer for the county fire and rescue services, in the email. 

The blog can be found at PGFDNews.com, and the county fire department posts more than just breaking news updates useful for journalists and local gawkers. 

The site also features profiles of county fire and rescue personnel, photo stories which take you behind the scenes and links to relevant news media coverage from around the area.

But there's also the county fire and rescue social media outlets, too, for those who like their news up-to-the-minute and in small bites. 

The county fire and emergency medical services department Tweets under the name @PGFDPIO. Fire Chief Marc Bashoor also tweets under @PGFD_CHIEF. The department also runs a Youtube channel where they'll post videos of rescuers in action and other clips and also maintains a Facebook page. 

Brady said in an interview that the increasingly digitized world of communications has been a game changer for the department. 

"We have almost stopped sending out the emailed news updates of that nature and have been relying primarily on Twitter to get information out," said Brady. "When I first started 18 years ago. we had a single page fax machine. If we wanted to get information out, I had to sit inside for a couple of hours sending out press releases to individual numbers. Now I can't even remember the last time we used the fax."

While the department's communications outlets are an obvious tool for journalists, Brady said that anyone in the community is welcome to access them. 

"There are a lot of community members out there that are very active and want to know everything that goes on in their communities," said Brady. "When I first started doing this, and up until today, when we post something on the blog or on Twitter or something, people will reply back to us thanking us for the information."

It seems as if a large number of local residents have already taken him up on the offer. The main Twitter account has more than 4,000 followers. The Facebook page has 3,400 followers. The blog doesn't do too bad, either. Brady said that the blog receives about 1,000 page views per day. Last month the blog had a total of about 29,000 page views.