The Preplan Project

A Lost Firefighter is either Dumb or Dead Using Map Based Pre-Incident Planning provides a lot of benefits and albeit a couple of challenges.  Below is a list of the pros and cons for using GIS or other mapping platforms for fire department pre-incident planning Pros Cons Hello, my name is Chris Rogers.  For over 30 years I have been using GIS in many ways to increase the ability to manage information for fire departments.  I have experimented with several ways to manage information leveraging both ESRI and other technologies to create maps and applications for pre-incident information.  This includes As I approach the end of my career in the fire service (who knows when for sure), it is my obligation to the fire service to share what I know so that it can be passed on to fellow firefighters.  So, I want to introduce "The Preplan Project" (it is the best catchy name that I could produce). The Preplan Project is a demonstration project using the latest technology to render and present "preplan" information in a variety of ways.  Preplan information can include building preplans, geographic area preplans, or even wildland preplans.  This project will be an ongoing effort and includes maps and apps that leverage some of the following In addition, I will be attempting to crosswalk several initiatives that have some complementary uses in pre-incident planning.  This includes More to follow.  This will be an ongoing project with intermittent updates. The use of GIS in creating pre-incident plans was born out of necessity to reduce duplicate work.  In the late 1990's the Kirkland Fire Department was already using ArcView 3.2 and eventually ArcGIS 9.1 to create the map books and wall maps for the fire stations.  The pre-incident planning program languished for years without any real progress from hand drawn site plan diagrams.  Many attempts were made to use software like Visio and AutoCAD but the learning curve for on duty firefighters was steep and the production time consuming. For all intents and purpose a pre-fire or pre-incident diagram is a map.  Much of the required data that is required for a pre-incident diagram include Kirkland and the surrounding area have excellent GIS data (street edge of pavement, centerline data, and building data) and the fire department maintains accurate hydrant, and address information.  This caused us to explore using GIS for most of our source data for the diagrams. The first attempts involved using these layers in conjunction with AutoCAD where we had most of the building symbols.   This was convenient considering that if anything like hydrant location changed would be reflected on the pre-fire.  It was still time consuming considering that you had to maintain the drawing in AutoCAD and then add the data as a theme in ArcView. Click to subscribe to any updates.

General

API Endpoints

Download

JSON

Feedback

If you notice any errors or missing data catalogs, please contact us at dateno@dateno.io or open an issue on GitHub. We will address it as soon as possible.