that may be your perception, but from my reading of your posts, you have just bagegd the crap out of the tower, and said what a watse it is...
my experience has seen it be the main/initial point of call for many incidents, including jobs in extremely built up areas where you would think the public would call it in first; examples that come to mind are a shed/grassfire in hawthorndene, and a shed fire around the st agnes area.
dont get me wrong, ill be the first to say that i think wuite a few of the 'tower operators' arent worth the AC bill.... but at the same time that tower not only shaves time off the initial reporting of incidents (or has in the past) and has also been used to confirm incidents (as you stated) but then give a semi-decent size up of whether mnore resources are going to be required straight away.
just my $0.02