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”.

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.