About this Adams County 911 dashboard

This page shows the 911 calls Adams County, Pennsylvania dispatch is handling right now — fires, medical calls, vehicle accidents, and police dispatches. It reads the county’s public dispatch feed every four minutes and is an unofficial mirror, not a county service.

How this dashboard works, field by field →

About this dashboard

Everything here comes from the public Adams County Department of Emergency Services live incident feed. Nothing is added to or removed from what the county publishes — it is only reformatted so it is legible on a phone, searchable, filterable, and plottable on a map.

Dispatch times are published by the county as Eastern time and are shown as Eastern wall-clock time wherever you are viewing from. This site is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Adams County government or Adams County Department of Emergency Services.

Municipalities covered (34)

Dispatches are reported for every borough and township in Adams County, including Gettysburg. Mutual-aid calls into neighboring counties are counted separately beneath the map.

  • Abbottstown Borough
  • Arendtsville Borough
  • Bendersville Borough
  • Berwick Township
  • Biglerville Borough
  • Bonneauville Borough
  • Butler Township
  • Carroll Valley Borough
  • Conewago Township
  • Cumberland Township
  • East Berlin Borough
  • Fairfield Borough
  • Franklin Township
  • Freedom Township
  • Germany Township
  • Gettysburg Borough
  • Hamilton Township
  • Hamiltonban Township
  • Highland Township
  • Huntington Township
  • Latimore Township
  • Liberty Township
  • Littlestown Borough
  • Mcsherrystown Borough
  • Menallen Township
  • Mount Joy Township
  • Mount Pleasant Township
  • New Oxford Borough
  • Oxford Township
  • Reading Township
  • Straban Township
  • Tyrone Township
  • Union Township
  • York Springs Borough
Frequently asked questions
Who runs this site?
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.
What exactly is being read to build this page?
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.
How stale can the page be?
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.
Can I find out which units are on a call?
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.
Why are there no road closures or fire hydrant advisories here?
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.
Is there scanner audio, and where does it play?
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.
Why is police radio traffic missing?
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.
Why does the map shade whole townships instead of marking the spot?
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.
How much of the county does this cover?
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.
Where do Fire, EMS, Traffic, Police and Other come from?
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.
Can I look up a call from last week?
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.
Does it cost anything?
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.