Question 1

Who runs this, and is it official?

Accepted Answer

One person, as an unpaid side project, with no involvement from anyone in county government. Lancaster County-Wide Communications publishes the underlying data; this site only re-presents it. Treat lcwc911.us and lancastercountypa.gov as authoritative and this page as a convenience. Nobody reads this website — emergencies go to 911.

Question 2

What exactly is being read to build this page?

Accepted Answer

An RSS feed. LCWC publishes its live incident list at webcad.lcwc911.us as XML, and every open call is one item element in it. A small function on our server fetches that XML, pulls the item title, its publication timestamp, and its description, and hands the result to your browser as JSON. There is no second source and no manual entry anywhere in the chain.

Question 3

How stale can what I am reading be?

Accepted Answer

Up to four minutes, plus however long LCWC takes to add a call to the feed. The header carries a countdown to the next automatic read and a button that forces one immediately. Because the RSS timestamps arrive with a timezone offset attached, the "12 min ago" figures are computed from an exact instant rather than a guess, and clock times are always shown as Lancaster County local time.

Question 4

Why are there no road closures, hydrant advisories, or assigned units here?

Accepted Answer

Because Lancaster’s feed does not contain them. Each RSS item carries three usable pieces of information: what kind of call it is, where it is, and when it went out. Some Pennsylvania counties publish closure lists, hydrant status, or a per-call unit roster, and the dashboards for those counties show them. Rather than invent the sections, this one leaves them out.

Question 5

What are the Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie scanner feeds?

Accepted Answer

Lancaster County fire radio traffic is split across three streams on Broadcastify instead of a single countywide dispatch channel, listed here as Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. Two more feeds cover operations channels and countywide fire and EMS paging. The Listen control in the header opens any of the five on Broadcastify, which is where the audio lives — their embed programme is limited to the owner of each feed, so nothing streams on this page.

Question 6

Can I hear police calls?

Accepted Answer

No, and no product can offer it. Law enforcement talkgroups here are encrypted, which means the audio is unintelligible to every scanner, app, and streaming service regardless of price. That is a radio system decision, not something this site chose or could undo. Fire and EMS traffic remains unencrypted.

Question 7

Why does the map shade a whole township rather than mark the address?

Accepted Answer

Because a mark would be fiction. The feed gives a municipality and a road, never coordinates and never a house number. So each municipality with an open call is drawn as a single circle matching that municipality’s land area, using US Census boundary data. It also matters that a large share of these calls are medical calls at somebody’s home; resolving those to a point would amount to publishing the address of a person who called 911.

Question 8

How does the site decide what the cross street is?

Accepted Answer

By pattern, not by lookup. The location line from the feed is tested for two road names joined by an ampersand, the word "and", or an at sign. When that matches, the first name becomes the street and the second becomes the cross street, and the untouched original is kept alongside it and stays searchable. When it does not match, the whole line is treated as one street.

Question 9

How much of the county is included?

Accepted Answer

All 60 municipalities: 41 townships, 18 boroughs, and the City of Lancaster. Matching is done on the municipality name plus its type, since Lancaster exists as both a city and a township. A call whose location does not resolve to one of the 60 — a mutual-aid run outside the county, for instance — is reported as unmatched below the map instead of being quietly discarded.

Question 10

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

Accepted Answer

From keyword matching that this site performs, in that order, on the call label LCWC supplies. FIRE, RESCUE, or HAZMAT anywhere in the label makes it Fire; MEDICAL, EMS, or AMBULANCE makes it EMS; TRAFFIC, ROAD, or MVA makes it Traffic; POLICE or LAW makes it Police; anything left over becomes Other. These five buckets exist to make filtering and colour-coding possible and are not LCWC classifications, so a label that looks wrong is usually the keyword list being crude.

Question 11

Can I look up a call from earlier today?

Accepted Answer

No. The feed is a snapshot of what is open at this second, and this site stores none of it. When LCWC clears a call it leaves the feed, and on the next read it leaves this page too. No archive, no incident permalinks, no arrest or blotter information exists here.

Question 12

What does using this cost?

Accepted Answer

Nothing, and there is no account to create. Hosting is paid for with advertising, which is why ad slots appear on the page. Advertisers have no say in what the incident list contains — that list is whatever the county feed said, reformatted.

Incident snapshot

About this Lancaster County 911 dashboard