When we arrived to the house, what I was looking at on First Due was an exact match to what I was looking at in real life...The guys knew exactly where and what everything was, it was pretty incredible, it felt like a well-rehearsed dance...We haven't been on a call without First Due ever since.
What we found was incredibly useful as First Due enabled us to access buoy data from offshore to monitor wind speeds and wave height, so we could better estimate the time frame of major winds/storm surge arriving in Orange Beach.
A the 2020 Bobcat fire quickly approached, we first went in to First Due and used the Occupancy Organizer to view a concise list of addresses that housed our at-risk residents and then provided this list to our partners in Law Enforcement as they were putting together their evacuation plans.
We get calls all the time from people in our community who want to make sure we know their situation in case we are ever called to their home. They call with things like where medication is located, information on mobility issues for people who would need extra assistance in evacuating, where bedrooms of small children or grandchildren are located, and other details specific to their home and family. It's so helpful being able to refer them to Community Connect where they can tell us everything, and then there it is, available to us the second we need it.
"First Due means consistency, ease of preplan creation and information access and community engagement through community connect."
"I've been in the fire service for 49 years and I've always struggled to get the preplan information to the firefighters in the field where they can access it and apply it to help protect their community and themselves. First Due has created a solution that is easy to use and easy to understand because it's visual. Now with v3 I can annotate and color code the occupancies in accordance with the Community Risk Reduction model that is being used for NFPA, ISO and Accreditation.”
