Monitoring Butler, PA fire and EMS. This is an unofficial news media site and it is not affiliated with any emergency services or government organizations. While an effort is made to create a post for most high-interest incidents, a post is not guaranteed for any particular incident. Coverage is limited. If you see something happening and there isn’t a post, feel free to submit a tip!
Since Butler County upgraded to the Inter County Regional Radio System (ICORRS), all local police departments in the county use encryption by default, and so their radio traffic cannot be monitored by anyone with any scanner equipment. Similarly, Pennsylvania State Police have long used PA-STARNet, or the Pennsylvania Statewide Radio Network, which also uses encryption and cannot be monitored by anyone. Therefore, any radio traffic regarding police posted to this site will almost always have been relayed by fire/EMS units or Butler Control. These other radios are capable of communicating with county fire and EMS units, but they typically stick to their own channels with encryption.
Most medical calls are not posted unless there is something about it of interest (e.g. air evacuation is requested).
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A big shout-out to those who have made contributions already! Every penny is greatly appreciated!
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why is commenting disabled on Facebook posts?
- This is the question I get most often. When the page was started, I allowed commenting. I admit that I miss the interaction with my readers, and there were certainly times where comments were useful to the overall purpose of the post. That said, I began to run into several problems that I see on quite a few “scanner pages” for other counties.
The comments become a jumbled, indecipherable mess. First, Facebook typically defaults to displaying whatever it considers “Top Comments” while hiding others. Then, it also lumps multiple comments into a timeframe such as “1hr” or “2hr,” so that you are unable to determine the actual order of the events. Next, in between actual updates to the incident, you have the multitude of well-wishers sending “thoughts & prayers” to the victims, who aren’t the intended target of the posts and aren’t likely to be reading the posts in real-time, anyway.
For these reasons, I’ve decided it is best to disable commenting in the interest of maintaining a professional appearance with a thorough picture of what is going on right in the post itself.
Please note that the official pages of most of the local Fire and EMS agencies ARE allowed to comment on my posts, if they wish to provide any information or details (such as road closure information) that I may be missing!!
I do occasionally post photos of incidents in the Facebook comments, as well, so if you see a comment count, take a look!
- This is the question I get most often. When the page was started, I allowed commenting. I admit that I miss the interaction with my readers, and there were certainly times where comments were useful to the overall purpose of the post. That said, I began to run into several problems that I see on quite a few “scanner pages” for other counties.
- Do you know why the live Butler scanner feed is offline?
- I do not. I use in-house equipment and do not provide any public streams at this time.
Without getting too in-depth, almost all of the apps for iPhone and Android out there use the same “feed” for Butler County, and the last that I had known, that feed was coming through a website or service called Broadcastify.
Further, I’ve been told the feed on Broadcastify itself is managed unofficially by folks from Harmony Station 22. You may be able to send them a message on their page at: https://www.facebook.com/harmonyfire22. Unfortunately, if it is an APP problem and not a FEED problem, they would not be able to assist with the apps.
In the future, I hope to begin providing an output stream to the public. This is a somewhat complicated endeavor to set up, and so will take some time between other things I have going on, as well.
- I do not. I use in-house equipment and do not provide any public streams at this time.