Field App for Incident Response

[ZorbaConlen1]

Hi. Curious what other agencies are doing to support firefighters en-route to an incident. Do agencies provide them with a mobile app with routing and access to prefire diagrams? And if so, what apps have you deployed?

At City of Bellevue, we had build a custom iOS app with ESRI technology the integrated with dispatch to handle routing, and also provided access via an offline map, to reference data like fire hydrants, as well as access to prefire drawings (this is the term we use for the diagrams of large buildings with info about entrances, lock boxes, stairs, hazardous materials, etc...), as PDFs that could be viewed on the device. The app has become difficult to maintain and pretty fragile and we recently retired it and have replaced it with the Explorer for ArcGIS native app. As an out of the box app, it's missing some of the custom features of the old app, but we are hoping to make up for that in terms of reliability and stability. 

That said, there are some significant limitations. It's not integrated with dispatch, so firefighters need to manually input addresses in order to get directions. We are currently not offering an offline version, so there are connectivity issues. We require a sign in, as the maps contain sensitive info and the firefighters hate taking the time for that as they have limited time to interact with the app and just want to get info fast. 

So, wondering how other agencies are tackling this. Using esri technology? Other vendors? Out of the box vs custom apps?

Thanks

[BenTurrell]

Hey Zobra,

This is a little bit of a different scenario for you. I live in Australia and have been helping out with support to the Australian bush fires. I've also had the unique opportunity of working with multiple agencies that are working to combat these fires. As you can imagine these fires have provide many difficult scenarios that have needed to be overcome by the people working to support the firefighters.

In my support to these agencies I've seen a wide range of Esri technologies being used as well as third party apps, custom scripts and workflows. A lot of the agencies are using ArcGIS Pro to produce static maps that are then emailed out and either printed out or uploaded to mobile devices to use offline in the field. Some of the agencies are now starting to see the benefits of live Operations Dashboards and Web maps but unfortunately due to the emergency of the situation these tools haven't been widely adopted yet.

One of the most difficult parts I've encountered is trying to bring all the data together at a National level. Each of the states and territories in Australia has it's own fire fighting services with their own ways of disseminating data. These feeds can range from incident points to burn scar areas with different fields, attributes and standards for the data. I've been using a lot of FME and Data Interoperability to try and bring various data sets in to try and map burn scars at a national level as well as to bring in other data such as population data and local government area data so that we can determine impacted people.

What I would like to see in the future and I'm sure we will start to see a lot more of in various Australia government agencies is more reliance on live mapping and tools that allow near real time ingestion of data. Some of the technologies I would like to see rolled out and how I think they could benefit the agencies I've listed below:

Survey123 / Collector

Allowing for near real time updates of incidents and fire areas is of the utmost importance. Having all the data collected utilizing common data formats and ensuring the data is correct and fit for purpose is a capability that these tools can provide. The ability for offline storing of results so that data can be uploaded when back in range of  internet is also beneficial.

ArcGIS Pro

I feel that there will always be a need for a printed map. Leveraging ArcGIS Pro's layout and automation of map development with python could drastically reduce the amount of time spent by GIS analysts making static maps.

Operations Dashboard

We had a development version of this running however due to the ever changing formats of the data that we were ingesting and the differing data capture by the states it was difficult to maintain a fully updated and automated Operations Dashboard. Should we start standardizing the data captured and the storage of that data then we could more efficiently stand these up in a crisis. Some of the metrics we were capturing included houses destroyed (manually updated) and Areas burnt (amalgamated data from the states) as well as displaying the burn scars on a map.

Workforce for ArcGIS

This could potentially be used for more of the cleanup/ recovery stage as away of managing people collecting data on the ground. Having an understanding of where people are and what data they are collecting could be a useful asset.

These are just some of the technologies I would recommend!

Thanks,

Ben

[ZorbaConlen1]

Ben, 

That is indeed a different scenario. Hard to imagine how complicated and dynamic that situation must be. I think your ideas for improvements to esri software make a lot of sense. 

Esri seems to offer a number of apps in this realm, but nothing specific for the first responder, who needs info at their finger tips quickly. At least nothing I'm finding that's tailored to firefighters requirements.

Thanks