Clarification: Director Laurain responds to Belleville FD incident

Van Buren Township Public Safety Director Greg Laurain said members of his department had a meeting on Monday about the story on page three in last week’s Independent about Belleville Mayor Pro Tem Jesse Marcotte who called for help from the city fire department and “nobody came.”
Van Buren Township handles police, fire and emergency dispatch for the City of Belleville under a paid agreement.
Director Laurain questioned the “eight-minute automatic-aid response” described by Councilman Ken Voigt, a retired city police officer, with city Fire Chief Brian Loranger agreeing. Laurain said there has been no such directive in his long tenure and he said Sgt. Louis Keele agreed it had never been in his long tenure, either.
Also, the statement that Van Buren Township dispatch holds off calling the fire department for five to seven minutes and the call goes to police and HVA first isn’t true, Laurain said.
“All fire calls are dispatched in a timely manner,” Laurain said. He noted that during the COVID crisis the township’s police weren’t dispatched to medical runs at all to cut down on the number of people potentially getting exposed to the virus.
He said VBT does have an automatic aid policy and sends its fire department when there is a working fire at a governmental, educational, business, or multi-level structure. This is different from mutual aid that is requested, he said.
“We’re doing a good job here,” Laurain said of the dispatch and fire department at the township.
Van Buren Township Fire Chief David McInally said the CAD system referred to by city Fire Chief Loranger is a system called BRYX that sends information to the monitor screen in the station and to individual phones to alert fire fighters to just who has responded as coming to the call.
Chief McInally said the dispatcher has to click the system and attach it to the call, putting “a truck” onto the map, and he has no idea if that was done in the Oct. 24 call by Mayor Pro Tem Marcotte.