Recently, I attended an  in-service instructor class taught by a well-respected  subject matter expert. This was a one time only event, so the room was packed. Unfortunately I was seated next to a firefighter with a portable radio.

Inevitably, a run was dispatched, and everyone  was distracted by the radio traffic between responders and the dispatch center.

We all have that building in our district that we drive past and quietly say to ourselves, “I hope we never have a fire there!” I am no exception, and for me it was a fleabag hotel located near the middle of my response district.

Sadly, I did have a fire there at 3 o’clock in the morning on a night that found the motel at full capacity. What made this incident even more concerning was that it was my very first fire as an Acting Battalion Chief.

 

As Firefighters and Paramedics we must often make critical decisions during very dynamic, time-compressed and stressful situations. We have all attended trainings such as High Rise Firefighting Command and Rapid Intervention Crew Deployment that have included tactical worksheets, checklists and other reference materials. However, during an incident these types of resources are not always utilized and we revert to working from memory.

The Denver Fire Department has been utilizing Tablet Command as an incident management and accountability solution since 2016. Early this year, the Denver Fire Department and the Denver Civil Service Commission asked us to create simulated incidents in Tablet Command for an upcoming Assistant Fire Chief promotional examination.

 

Later today (Wednesday Oct. 17, 2018), Tablet Command will be making its latest version available in the App Store.  Version 1.6.6 will be available for manual update for the next 7 days. Beginning Wednesday Oct. 24, 2018, users who have application auto-update enabled will be updated using Phased Release.  This version has been tested over the last several weeks by our beta users and feedback has been positive. This version resolves known issues as well as providing enhancements for our Tablet Command Enterprise Pro 2 Way customers.

 

Over the last several months we've been inundated by news of major emergencies around our country and beyond. Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey have been the most prominent progeny of the Atlantic hurricane assembly line and they left total disaster in their wake. Regrettably, many large-scale emergency situations are not the results of natural events but are created by the actions of people. Over and over again, we see tragedies unfold in small towns and large cities alike with the continuing epidemic of active shooter incidents.

Since Sunday, the Tablet Command team has been watching for updates and had a difficult time locating maps that displayed the hotspots of the fire and active fire perimeters. We found that the information on other maps was not complete or useful. We decided to make our own with one of the great tools that we use frequently.


Esri provides some excellent tools and one of those tools, ArcGIS Online is used by Tablet Command to support our customers access to agency GIS information. ArcGIS Online is a great way for any agency to create custom web maps with dynamic data within a matter of minutes. We created this web map with Esri ArcGIS Online in about 20 minutes. We have been using it so much that we decided that we should share it with everyone.