ESRI's ArcGIS supports the Milford Fire Department with numerous public safety activities, including planning, preparedness, mitigation, response and incident management.
"We have a very active, elaborate prefire plan program that has helped us with our incident response," says Lou LaVecchia, Milford Fire Department chief. "We recognized the need to get this information maintained and disseminated electronically. Now we have a faster, more efficient, and automated method for getting the right information to the personnel who need it. Using our GIS platform and applications, we can make information available in a way we could not do before."
The Milford Fire Department is a full-service agency that handles all aspects of emergency services including fire, emergency medical service, rescue and hazardous materials response, to name a few. The highly touted agency is a Class One fire department -- the highest rating possible -- and is only one of three in the New England area. Nationwide, only 44 out of approximately 43,000 fire departments have earned this distinction.
As part of the agency's leading fire service delivery efforts, the department has a comprehensive collection of prefire plans for the thousands of buildings and land parcels located within its service area. The Milford Fire Department uses ArcGIS 9 to manage these plans and other data using advanced computing, geoprocessing and visualization tools. ArcGIS is a scalable framework of integrated GIS software for building a complete GIS. The open, standards-based technology uses object-oriented programming to provide fast customization along with a highly intuitive interface that is easy to install and deploy.
As part of its overall GIS platform, the Milford Fire Department takes advantage of leading software packages from various ESRI business partners. First Look Pro, from The Cad Zone, is used to organize and access all critical preincident planning information. The Omega Group's FireView software provides industry-specific mapping tools to help review existing deployment policies and develop new strategies. The MFD dispatch center is also equipped with CompassCom software for automatic vehicle location and mobile asset tracking.
The computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system links to mobile, GIS-enabled computers in the fire trucks. When a call comes in to the Milford E-911 center, the CAD system automatically notifies the mobile computers, and existing prefire plans are pulled up on screen, along with integrated tabular information, which can be analyzed and visually displayed while en route to an emergency. Data on parcels, buildings, fire hydrants, fire department connections, hazardous materials, and more is available in the mobile computers. In addition, the fire department works closely with the Milford GIS department.
The system came in response to the agency's need to have a better method for managing and maintaining its rich collection of 3,500 prefire plans that were assembled and built over years. These plans were generated and maintained using paper-based methods, were updated once a year, and were looked up manually by street address. The system will continue to be extended to include more data.
