Question 1

Who runs this site?

Accepted Answer

A volunteer, working alone, with no county involvement of any kind. Nothing here is reviewed or approved by Adams County, and nobody at the county is responsible for it. Treat adamscountypa.gov as the authority on anything you read here, and call 911 if you need help — this page is unattended and reaches nobody.

Question 2

What exactly is being read to build this page?

Accepted Answer

One web page: the incident list published at incidents.adamscountypa.gov. It is a plain HTML table with four columns — call number, location, time, and nature of the call. A small function on our server requests that page, pulls the rows out of the table, and hands them to your browser as JSON. There is no second feed, no scanner transcription, and nobody typing calls in by hand.

Question 3

How stale can the page be?

Accepted Answer

Four minutes at worst on our side. The dashboard re-reads the county page on a four-minute cycle, counts down to the next read in the header, and re-reads immediately if you press Refresh. Whatever delay the county page itself carries is added on top of that, and we have no way to measure it.

Question 4

Can I find out which units are on a call?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for most calls. Tap Details on a card and it turns over to show the roster the county publishes for that call number: each unit, what kind of unit it is, and the times it went enroute, arrived, and cleared. A dash means the county has not filled that time in yet. If a call has no detail link, the card has nothing extra to show.

Question 5

Why are there no road closures or fire hydrant advisories here?

Accepted Answer

Because Adams County does not publish them. The county incident page carries active calls and nothing else, so there is no closure list or out-of-service hydrant list for this site to mirror. Some Pennsylvania counties do publish those lists, which is why a sibling dashboard for another county may show sections this one does not.

Question 6

Is there scanner audio, and where does it play?

Accepted Answer

Two Adams County feeds are linked from the Listen control in the header: a combined fire and EMS dispatch feed, and a fire police feed. Both are hosted on Broadcastify and open there in a new tab. No audio is streamed through this site, because Broadcastify only grants in-page embedding to the owner of a feed.

Question 7

Why is police radio traffic missing?

Accepted Answer

The police talkgroups are encrypted, so there is no audio for anyone to carry. That applies to every scanner, app, and paid service equally — it is a radio system decision, not a gap on this page. Fire and EMS traffic is not encrypted, which is why those feeds exist.

Question 8

Why does the map shade whole townships instead of marking the spot?

Accepted Answer

A marker would be invention. The county gives a road name and a municipality, never coordinates and never a house number, so the honest way to draw a call is to shade the municipality it happened in. That is what the map does, with each municipality sized to its real land area from US Census boundary data. The other reason is privacy: a large share of these calls are medical calls at somebody’s home, and a precise dot would point at the person who dialled 911.

Question 9

How much of the county does this cover?

Accepted Answer

All 34 municipalities the Census lists for Adams County — 21 townships and 13 boroughs. Adams has no city; Gettysburg, the county seat, is a borough. Calls dispatched outside those 34 places, such as mutual aid over a county line, cannot be matched to a municipality, so they are counted and stated openly under the map instead of being quietly discarded.

Question 10

Where do Fire, EMS, Traffic, Police and Other come from?

Accepted Answer

From keyword matching on the county’s nature text, in that order. FIRE, RESCUE or HAZMAT lands in Fire; MEDICAL, EMS or AMBULANCE in EMS; TRAFFIC, ROAD or MVA in Traffic; POLICE or LAW in Police; anything unmatched falls to Other. These five buckets exist so the filters and the card colours have something to work with. They are not Adams County classifications, and a call in the wrong bucket is our keyword list being crude rather than the county being wrong.

Question 11

Can I look up a call from last week?

Accepted Answer

No, and not through any workaround. The county page is a snapshot of what is open at this moment, and this site stores nothing of its own — when a call clears it leaves the county page and vanishes from here at the next read. There is no archive, no incident permalink, and no arrest or blotter data at all.

Question 12

Does it cost anything?

Accepted Answer

No, and there is nothing to sign up for. Hosting is paid for by the ads on the page. Ads have no bearing on the incident list, which is simply whatever the county feed contained at the last read.

Terms of use

This is not an emergency service

Not an official county service

The data is provided as-is

Do not rely on it for decisions that matter

About the people involved in incidents

Acceptable use

Third-party content and links

Advertising

Intellectual property

Changes to these terms

Contact