BOULDER — Want to fight wildfires? There’s an app for that.
The Boulder Fire Department took advantage of a multi-jurisdictional wildfire training exercise Friday to test out a new technology, called Android Team Awareness Kit, that they hope will help them better coordinate efforts to fight large wildland fires and communicate with crews on the ground.
The app, designed by PAR Government Systems Corp., is based on military technology designed to track personnel and feed them geographical information in real time.
Using the technology, firefighters would be able to see a map of the area, the location of crews on the ground and even live video sent from aerial support to give them a bigger and better picture of a wildland fire.
“That helps the firefighters be more situationally aware,” said David Tally, the director of applied technology at PAR. “This will greatly help the guys who are fighting the fires.”
The Boulder Fire Department was chosen to help pilot the testing of the app, and crews are using a scheduled training that started Friday to test out the app, which can run off of cellphone networks or a mobile network in more remote areas. The app is not available for the general public.
“We’re on the forefront of this technology,” said Dave Zader, the wildland fire administrator for Boulder.
Currently, Zader said, crews on the ground have to carry around paper maps and try to radio each other descriptions of locations, which can take a long time, be inaccurate and clutter radio traffic. The app will give firefighters all the same map data they can access on their phones that will also tell them where other firefighters are in real time.
“It’s a way of sharing the data versus trying to communicate over a single-voice radio channel,” Zader said. “As firefighters, we’re the most at risk, and we need to have that information in the field.”
While Zader and Tally were standing in a staging area near Lee Hill Drive and Broadway, they could even use the app to pull up live video that a plane flying overhead was broadcasting of the area. The aerial footage could be useful for firefighters trying to coordinate multiple crews on the ground, see where a fire is headed or spot smaller fires popping up in the area.
As the technology expands, Zader said the app will hopefully be able to even upload information from crews to a fire prediction model to give firefighters an advantage in battling a blaze.
“It’s an incredible tool,” Zader said. “It can pull down all of these internet resources we didn’t have access too.”
Testing out the app was just one of the things that firefighters were working on during the exercise, which involved numerous agencies from across the Front Range.
Zader said they try to do large training exercises like this once every year or two. It gives fire departments the opportunity to work on everything from coordinating helicopters’ bucket drops to getting local city departments to close down trails and lakes.
“We’re working on our overall wildfire system and how we communicate with each other,” Zader said. “It starts from the one guy who first finds the fire and will grow as if this was a real fire threatening Boulder or the surrounding communities.”
