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Westmoreland County covers just over a thousand square miles of southwestern Pennsylvania, and the roughly 350,000 people who live there are split among more than sixty separate municipalities: small cities like Greensburg, Latrobe, Jeannette, and New Kensington, a long list of boroughs, and townships that run from dense suburb to ridge-top farmland. Almost none of them are big enough to run their own dispatch center. Instead the calls funnel into the county 911 center in Greensburg, which sends out municipal police where a department exists, the Pennsylvania State Police where one doesn't, and a fire service that is overwhelmingly volunteer nearly everywhere.
In a big city you pick a precinct or a division and follow it. Westmoreland doesn't work that way. The dispatcher is the one thread connecting a borough officer in Monessen, a state trooper on the Turnpike, and a volunteer company toning out for a barn fire twenty miles east. All of it comes through one channel:
Westmoreland County Public Safety
Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Begin by downloading Scanner Radio, a free app that streams live police, fire, and EMS radio straight to your phone. Once it's installed, tap the button above to open the Westmoreland County Public Safety feed and you'll be hearing county dispatch in seconds.
If you want to narrow things down, search "Westmoreland" in the app. Westmoreland County Fire is the one worth pairing with the countywide feed, since it isolates the fireground and mutual-aid traffic that gets busiest during a working incident. Separate police dispatch and EMS dispatch channels are listed there too, along with a Greensburg fire feed for anyone who only cares about the county seat. Across the western line, Allegheny County and the city of Pittsburgh have their own feeds. No hardware, antenna, or setup required. Just the app and a few seconds to tap into a channel.
The county's road network sets the rhythm. Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, runs the length of it through Greensburg and the townships around it and generates a constant drip of collisions, disabled vehicles, and retail calls. The Pennsylvania Turnpike cuts across the southern half with the New Stanton interchange in the middle, which means multi-vehicle crashes that pull companies from several municipalities at once. Up north, Route 22 and the river towns of the Alle-Kiski valley around New Kensington and Lower Burrell have a different texture entirely, older and denser, closer to Pittsburgh's orbit than to the farmland twenty miles east.
Then the land tilts up. The eastern edge of the county climbs Chestnut Ridge and Laurel Ridge into the Laurel Highlands, and the calls change with the elevation: brush fires on the ridges, hikers and riders needing a carry-out, and truck traffic struggling with the long grade on Route 30 down Laurel Mountain in bad weather. Ligonier fills up on summer weekends when Idlewild is running and again in October for Fort Ligonier Days. Latrobe has Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, which puts the occasional aircraft standby into the mix. Underneath all of it is the volunteer fire service, and that's the part most newcomers find unexpectedly compelling: a tone goes out, and you hear crews signing on from their own driveways, minute by minute, until enough of a company is rolling to make the call. If the ten-codes and clipped phrasing throw you at first, our guide to scanner codes will get you up to speed, and how emergency dispatch works explains why calls unfold in the order they do. Listening from the other side of the county line? Our Pittsburgh scanner guide covers Allegheny County.
You can listen to Westmoreland County police, fire, and EMS radio using the Scanner Radio app.
Yes. Listening to publicly broadcast scanner traffic is legal in Pennsylvania and across the United States. Restrictions only apply to using a scanner while committing a crime.
No. With the Scanner Radio app, you can listen to Westmoreland County dispatch traffic straight from your phone. There is no hardware, antenna, or setup required.
The Westmoreland County Public Safety feed is the natural first stop. It carries countywide dispatch traffic, so calls from the boroughs, the townships, and the volunteer fire companies all land in the same place.
It carries public safety radio traffic from across Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, including Greensburg, Latrobe, Jeannette, New Kensington, Murrysville, Monessen, Ligonier, and the townships in between.
Westmoreland County has more than sixty separate municipalities, most of them small boroughs and townships. Rather than each running its own dispatch center, they are dispatched from the county 911 center in Greensburg, and the Pennsylvania State Police cover the townships without a local department. That is why a single countywide feed reaches so much ground.
Listening from somewhere else? Swipe through our other city guides.
