Florence, Arizona

Billingsley: “Florence is one of the oldest towns in the Western United States, and we have one of the finest nationally registered Historic Districts in Arizona. Unfortunately, we’ve lost six of our treasured historic buildings in the last 20 years due to fires. A while ago, our Fire Marshal came to me and said, ‘We have to do something to stop losing these buildings.’ So, we worked with a vendor and came up with a solution that is a commercial wireless fire alarm. The great thing about that for a beautiful old building made of adobe is that there is no hole drilling, no running conduit or wires. “The Town got very creative by telling anyone who owns a historic building in the downtown that we’ll pay for the backbone of the system if they pay for the individual units for their buildings. So, if you purchase or own one of those old buildings and need to bring it up to code, you can purchase a commercial fire alarm system at about 30 percent of the cost as a traditional system because we’re covering the monitoring and other expenses. And you don’t have to drill holes in your building. You sign an agreement FLORENCE , AR I ZONA with the Town to be part of the commercial wireless fire alarm program and then you work directly with the vendor to buy the sensors necessary for your building. The vendor installs them and then we cover the costs from there. “Once all the Smart City sensors are in place and the whole system is brought online and functional, they will report into the database and then the key will be machine learning and artificial intelligence to utilize that data to make smart decisions. So, imagine a day in Florence, Arizona in the future when we know there’s a fire before there’s a call to the Fire Department. When the system speaks to itself, because it is all integrated, dispatches the firefighters, and then simultaneously turns on the pumps at the wells on the other side of town in order to build up the water pressure and supply that will be necessary to respond to the fire. That’s the beauty of collecting the data, and storing the data, and analyzing the data in a non-proprietary format that allows you to truly become a Smart City.”