2016 WLIA Annual Conference

Paul Wickman, RESPEC
Local government fire departments need to demonstrate their performance and efficiency. In this session we will show how CartoDB and Torque are being used to visualize fire department responses to emergency events throughout the city allowing city officials to better understand how they are performing. We will also briefly discuss why routing based on Open Street Maps is not yet sufficient enough to be used for this analysis.
Effective Response Force (ERF) is one method that fire departments use to measure their level of success. An ERF is a set of specific resources required to perform a particular task within a set amount of time. For example, the Effective Response Force for a residential building fire, which is less than 200 square meters in size, needs to be four fire engines, one ambulance and a fire chief. These resources may be coming from different fire stations; they may be coming directly from other emergency events. They may even come from neighboring cities.
Using CartoDB and Torque we can visualize several things; the expected travel routes each of these resources may have taken, compare these routes to expected ?drive-times? based on GIS road network analysis, and also show the order in which each of these resources arrived at the destination.