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”.

The Tablet Command team has been hard at work developing and deploying new features to better meet the needs of the responders we serve. The pace of change has accelerated over the past several months, and we thought we should provide a review of the highlights in the event that you’ve missed something.

Personnel accountability on the emergency scene has long posed challenges for the fireground Incident Commander (IC). The fire service has employed a number of low tech solutions in an effort to enhance accountability; T Cards, Personnel Accountability Tags (PAT), Passport Systems, and Accountability Officers to name just a few. None of these solutions have provided the real time accuracy required to achieve any meaningful measure of accountability.

Agencies can combine the power of Tablet Command, ESRI’s Survey 123 and ArcGIS Online to quickly collect and display geospatial data.  These powerful collaborative tools can be used for a wide variety of situations including damage assessments, marking hazardous occupancies, and identifying safe zones and lookouts during wildland pre-incident planning.

As first responders around the world cope with the impacts of  COVID 19, Tablet Command continues to support our customers by providing access to expanded Tablet Command services at no additional cost for the duration of this emergency. Tablet Command is resilient by design, and the Tablet Command team and infrastructure are agile and well positioned for events of this kind. We are committed to doing everything we can to support the public safety community and response personnel.

In response to customer demand, we have created a bundled basic version of Tablet Command Enterprise.  Not surprisingly, we call it Tablet Command Basic!  

While the North American wildland fire season has wound down with the arrival of winter, our attention turns to Australia where fires are devastating the entire country. Let's look back at how North American Tablet Command customers used mapping, location, and incident management tools to enhance operational efficiency and responder safety while gaining an advantage during the 2019 Fire Season.

If you're interested in Tablet Command but don't know how to get started, we have a solution for you...

Download Tablet Command from the App Store (onto your iPad) to learn why Fire Departments across North America are using this best in class tool to enhance incident response and management.

 

Emergency responders have been using Tablet Command on iPads and iPhones for years. Now public safety professionals with Android phones can also use TC Mobile. 

Anyone with a Smartphone and a subscription to their department’s Tablet Command service can have real time  access to emergency call notifications and CAD notes.

We are excited to announce the release of TC Mobile for Android v1.0!  It will be available in the Google Play store Monday August 18th.