I was selected for flight rescue training early in my career as a firefighter/paramedic. Training started on the ground, running through some pre-hoist/rescue checklists. The crew chief called out: "Power to the cable cutter," the pilot responded, "Check." After two rounds, I asked, "What is the cable cutter?" The crew chief explained that the pilot could activate a demolition charge in the hoist that would sever the cable and drop the load if it became tangled, or if the aircraft suffered a mechanical failure. I paused for a second and realized that I was the load!  It turns out there were not one but two ways to cut me – the load – from the aircraft.

With version 3.4 of Tablet Command we released a series of new features and user interface changes to make the app easier to use, more intuitive and flexible.  In the 3.4 release notes we detailed some of these features. We also felt it would be helpful to create a series of short videos to further explain the features and show how to take advantage of them.

Tablet Command is excited to welcome Mike McMath to the team as a Customer Support Specialist. For the last 30 years, he has worked for fire and EMS organizations in Southern California, including the Redlands Fire Department, where he retired as a Captain. Mike is passionate about improving the technical capabilities and overall success of the fire service, having implemented influential services such as incident reporting, fire prevention inspections, electronic patient care records, station alerting, staffing management, CAD services, as well as Tablet Command, for many San Bernardino County organizations.

For more about Mike and the rest of our team, see the Our Team page.

Late last week most of the AlertWildfire Cameras were no longer available from the AlertWildfire Web site and therefore from the authoritative CalOES California Webcams map layer, which many of Tablet Command customers use routinely to access live camera feeds.  Many of the camera feeds are now available on the Alert California site, but there is not a map layer available to replace the CalOES layer.  Several customers reached out with concerns about not having access to this important situational awareness tool at a critical time during the California Wildland season.

Eric joins Tablet Command as a Product Specialist after a 31-year fire service career with the Puget Sound Fire Department near Seattle, WA. Eric brings a command officer perspective and a core value of taking care of people. During his career, he served as a Shift Commander, as well as the Chief of Training for the South King County Fire Training Consortium, where he helped to develop a shared training division serving the needs of 12 neighboring organizations. As a regional Training Chief, he was an early promoter of Tablet Command as a platform to improve firefighter safety and consistency in operations. Eric retired as the Assistant Chief of Operations for Puget Sound Fire in 2020. As a member of Tablet Command, he looks to contribute further to improvements across the Fire Service industry.

Nelson is an accomplished business executive with a trades and public safety background. He worked with Ontario Hydro in Canada for a decade as an Electrical Inspector to improve electrical safety for clients, and to reduce workplace fatalities. In the late 1990’s, Nelson turned his attention to helping fire service organizations manage risk in the emergency response environment. To that end, he set up and served as President of three private corporations in both the USA and Canada to provide risk management products. Educated at York University and Schulich School of Business, over the last 20 years he has built a strong network of clients and contacts in the North American and Australian fire service industries.

The Tablet Command team is committed to evaluating legacy public safety technology strategies and developing innovative solutions focused on the unique needs of the response environment. Easy access to maps annotated with current and accurate incident information for first responders is one of the challenges that has not been addressed to date. Traditionally, incident maps provided a historic record of events and conditions, as opposed to real time intelligence that can be revised and updated from the field in real time.  To address this challenge, Tablet Command and Fire Front Solutions collaborated to develop an integration to FireMapper.

Tablet Command and TrainFirefighters.com, two Northern California companies founded by highly experienced firefighters, have entered into a powerful partnership that will result in better and safer fireground tactical leadership for first responders across North America.

Record Breaking Wildfires

In recent years, record-breaking wildfires in the western United States have posed a complex set of new challenges to incident managers. Not only have these fires been the largest in history but they have also created an enormous cost for states like Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona.  Many factors suggest that these fires are only growing larger and occuring at an unrelenting frequency; in fact, every year has been hotter, and each successive fire season has gotten bigger and lasted longer than the last.  Experts widely agree that we’ve entered into an era of apocalyptic “Mega Fires”.