Utilizing MapPoint for Emergency Services

Utilizing MapPoint for Emergency Services

Mike Mueller of the Lannon Fire Department in Wisconsin discusses the opportunities and challenges in implementing MapPoint 2004 for a small village's volunteer fire department

Read the full article here:
http://www.mp2kmag.com/a112--emergency.services.lannon.mappoint.html

This reminds me of a scheme from the late 1980s that my father was involved in.
That was with Berkshire County Fire Brigade (UK), and I think West Midlands might have been involved.

There's a requirement in the UK that a fire brigade can reach any location within their county within so-many minutes. So they were looking at ways of getting maps to the fire crews. I think it was more in the way of building layouts, hydrant locations,etc. rather than specific routing information, but they may well have been using routes.

At first they looked at having the information on a PC on the fire engine, but found that typical fire engine 'maneuveurs' and hard-disks did not mix. Last I heard (15 years ago!) they were investigating faxing the fire engine so that it could receive the plans/maps as it was on the move.
The joke at the time was that if the fire was around the corner, then it would have been quicker to send someone on foot...

They were also looking at using a GIS for handling fire hydrant checks. Much of the gain was a change in procedures (ie. send someone in a van to check them, rather than an appliance and crew), but they were also GIS-ing it.

This being 15 years ago, costs were considerably more than with MapPoint today! I don't think MapPoint could do everything they were doing, but with a bit of back-end DB-interface programming it is going to be pretty damm close; and without the cost of the county maps.


Richard

The routing isn't used so much for routing, more of a pointer to where one is going. Lannon is small enough to easily figure it out (~2.5 sq miles), but we cover Menomonee Falls also for another ~10 miles. The bad part is Menomonee Falls addresses can not be resolved, the DB contains the GPS coordinates for them.


Here are some graphics

In use:
http://www.lannonfire.com/images/Misc/Sample1.gif

Area (yellow is routable, grey is not):
http://www.lannonfire.com/images/Misc/LFD_Area.gif


Mike Mueller