NORFOLK, Neb. (KTIV) - Getting behind the wheel means not only paying attention to other drivers around you, but listening for emergency vehicles, too.

Norfolk Fire Rescue has a new piece of technology in their rigs to help drivers on the road in front of them.

“It’s a device that goes in our units that notifies drivers of ambulances that are approaching and or drivers that are approaching an emergency scene,” said Assistant Fire Chief Trever O’Brien.

When you get behind the wheel of a car, it’s common knowledge that you need to pull over to the side of the road to let emergency vehicles pass. But what if you don’t see the lights or hear the sirens? This new technology utilized by Norfolk Fire Rescue alerts drivers through apps or even the radio that they have emergency vehicles coming up behind them, giving them plenty of time to pull over safely and let these emergency vehicles pass.

“So it’s really done in the background,” explained O’Brien. “We have a device that’s tied in with our lights. So when we turn the lights on, it activates the device, and then depending on what vehicle we’re approaching would depend on how that alert goes out.”

The device is called the Haas Alert System. It communicates with navigation apps like Waze to give drivers a heads-up to approaching emergencies.

“Waze also communicates with several other apps such as Spotify, Pandora, Audible, those types of things, that if Waze is open in the background, and you’re listening to one of those app functions, it’s supposed to turn your music down and give you that notification,” said O’Brien.

The goal is to give drivers plenty of time to pull over safely. “This hopefully will give you advanced warning maybe before you hear the sirens and allow you to calmly pull over to the side and hopefully give you an enough advanced warning that you’re not panicked when a vehicle comes up on you or you’re approaching a scene.”

The technology is also smart enough to only alert drivers in the path of the emergency or emergency vehicles. “It is supposed to be a smart device that it notifies the people that are on the road that either the event is happening on the road that the emergency vehicle is traveling on and it’s supposed to be smart enough, if the roads are running parallel, that it will not notify a road that the ambulance is not on,” explained O’Brien. “Otherwise, it’s supposed to be smart enough to identify the vehicles traveling on the same road as the emergency.”

It also allows emergency responders to better communicate with each other while traveling to scenes. “One of the other features on this it’s called the ‘responder to responder’,” said O’Brien, “so what that will do is we have a station in the northwest part of town. And then we have our main station, which is downtown. And it is often that we respond to incidents on the west end of town. And we have a common intersection that we intersect at about the same time. And what this could do for us, it could notify each individual rig that we are approaching.”

Norfolk Fire Rescue is on the forefront of technology in fire service, already using drones to aid at fire scenes.

“We embrace technology for a lot of different reasons,” said O’Brien. “And we we have some desires to do more in the future. So we’re looking forward to that.”

This alert system not only helping drivers on the road, but first responders too.

“Emergency Vehicle response in our industry has a big impact on responder safety,” said O’Brien. “So it’s imperative for us for injury prevention and potentially saving people’s lives and having fatalities become part of what we do. So I think having this here and in notifying people is going to be a big deal for us.”

Norfolk Fire Rescue started using the Haas Alert technology in their fire trucks and ambulances in November.

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This story was originally published by Katie Copple at KTIV