Fire/Rescue and EMS
Fire/Rescue
For fire and rescue, wildfire, and emergency medical services, the mission to protect life, property, and natural resources never changes. What does change are the new challenges and increased demands agencies must meet to achieve their objectives and provide public safety [PDF].
GIS helps public safety agencies optimize their service delivery in all facets of their mission including
- Preparedness
- Mitigation
- Response [PDF]
- Recovery
Maps are an essential tool for the fire service [PDF]. GIS extends the capability of maps to provide intelligent, interactive visualization of location-based data and analysis. GIS enables:
Comprehensive situational awareness in order to understand the activities, events, incident status and overall circumstances of the jurisdiction.
The ability to quickly and thoroughly conduct risk assessment and to develop and assess response capability to effectively manage and allocate public safety resources and staffing.
The capability to access critical information and data while responding to an incident (routing, pre-incident surveys, etc.) resulting in quicker, safer and more intelligent deployment.
The ability to more effectively manage all types of incidents (real-time location of public safety units, exposures at risk, areas suitable for staging, triage. etc) and develop and implement appropriate tactics and strategy.
Emergency Medical Services (EMS)
EMS organizations must ensure that the appropriate number of units and trained personnel are assigned at any given time to meet the emergency medical demand within prescribe response time standards. GIS optimizes the deployment of EMS resources to meet the emergency medical service mission.
GIS provides decision makers with the information they need to:
- Analyze historical incidents to determine staffing and resource needs.
- Provide dynamic analysis to determine optimum EMS unit positioning.
- Supply dispatchers with a comprehensive view of EMS unit locations and their response capability.
- Create a common operating picture that dynamically updates incident and unit locations and provides predictive EMS call potential based upon historic occurrences.
- Support EMS units with field GIS capabilities.