The International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) announced a partnership on Tuesday with Esri to geo-enable the association’s programs and applications in order to support the growing demands of first responders around the world.
Esri specializes in geographic information system (GIS) technology and has projects in each of the 200 largest U.S. cities.
“Technology and information-gathering continues to expand exponentially around the world,” Tommy Hicks, assistant executive director of IAFC, said. “Analyzed correctly, the fire and emergency service can leverage this data to improve service delivery, save lives and mitigate property loss at the local level.”
Esri and IAFC worked together to create the National GIS Viewer, which provides first responders a lesson on geospatially enabled decision support tools and shows how they can assist first responders in strategic planning and operations.
“The first step was to develop an interactive information sharing environment using the Esri story map journal template,” Chris McIntosh, director of public safety at Esri, said. “This enables first responders to view comprehensive information products within their community. Accessing this data is challenging as the information resides in many different websites. Using the National GIS Viewer, a responder can aggregate that data and drill down to see important information about their community.”
IAFC represents the leadership of firefighters and emergency responders worldwide.