>> Afternoon we're going to go ahead and get started, I'm James Duggan.
      "Beyond fire hydrant location: what firefighters need to know."
      By: James Duggan.
      I do a lot of presentations during budget times and usually those are not so comfortable, so this is really refreshing to be here, and I really want to thank you for your time for being here, especially after lunch.  Especially on a nice afternoon like it is today.  I understood there would be exactly four people here for this presentation.  So if you find yourself in the wrong place inadvertently, feel free, I won't be offended if you need to find where you really want to be.  But I will definitely try to make it interesting.
      I'm going to talk a little bit about Tacoma fire department, a little bit about the fire service, and then I'm going to get into an area that I really enjoy talking about that I really don't have too many opportunities to do that.  So first, the Tacoma fire department, we've been around for a very, very long time.  I haven't been, but the department has been around that long since 1880.  So we predate the state of Washington -- or Washington was the territory at the time.  We predate the City of Tacoma, I would like to remind my boss, the city manager that occasionally.  And we also predate OSM.
      [Laughter]
      We serve the communities of Tacoma Fircest and Fife, that's a population of 25,000 now, during the workdays, that swells to 370 million.  We cover 62 square miles with 15 fire stations and in those 15 fire stations, we have 13 fire engines, four ladders, five ambulances, two -- three battalion chiefs, a safety officer, and also fireboat, hazardous materials, technical rescue, so we're considered a full service fire department.  And all the other things we don't do is airport fire response because we don't have an airport.  And we do that with 388 personnel.  38 are civilians and including in this civilians is a GI analyst.  And we're busy.  We're a busy department.  Our call volume continues to rise last year over 45,000 emergency incidents.  So our personnel stayed very busy.
      Being an urban department, we have to fight fires aggressively.  That means we go inside, and you can see the firefighter -- this is a fire late May this year going inside the structure.  And also firefighters on top of the structure on the roof creating wind pull so that all the dangerous gas and fires can escape so the people putting the fire out can get deep inside into the fire and extinguish it.  And the reason we have to be an aggressive fire department is because our buildings and our houses are close together.  We -- fairly dense as far as houses.  And we have never had a great fire that other municipalities had, so it's good for us to put it out in the origin and not spread to adjacent houses, adjacent blocks, and cause a lot of damage to our community.  And this is an example at a older house had fire several years ago, and you wouldn't know it.  It looks like it's a house that we were able to save most of it.  They had to do a lot of extensive remodeling on the inside, but we tried to save the structure.  And the fire was contained that particular house it didn't spread to let adjacent houses.  And because of that, you walk around Tacoma, there's a huge inventory of really architecturally interesting residential homes from the Victorian era all the way through Queen Anne and then the turn of the century there's the colonial revival homes.  And then the arts and crafts movement, lots of craftsman -- the larger size ones.  And then also the typical craftsman bungalows.  And that's, again, we like to take credit for that because we've been an aggressive fire department for a very long time.
      That does give us some problems, though, because those houses continue to age, they continue to have issues that may not be updated and that can give us more of a fire concern and a fire risk.  So it's kind of a two-way sword.
      So that was kind of the typical, this is the Tacoma fire department and this is how we do business.  But this is kind of interesting stuff I want to talk about here is why would firefighters be natural allies in the open mapping movement?  And I'm going to give you three reasons.  And then I'm going to kind of get to what the title of the topic was, what really is important beyond, for the fire service, and particularly for our department, beyond mapping locations of fire departments.
      Well, the first reason while firefighters would embrace open mapping is because they've been doing mapping for a very long time.  This is inside a fire station, this is fire station number 13, if you're familiar with Tacoma, this is in the prospector district.  This is when our older stations but not the oldest, this is probably I think 1906, 1908 in that era.  But if you walked upstairs in the door against the wall, and I included the doorjamb there so that you could see the scale.  There is a map of most of their response area.  And if you look really closely, you can see the white dots and those dots are locations of fire hydrants.
      So for a very long time, we have known the importance of fire hydrants because you cannot be an aggressive fire department without having a good water supply and knowing where that water supply is.
      Also, not just in the station, but also in the fire engines themselves had scrolling maps.  And this little box set was on the dashboard of the fire engine in a little handle that turned and the map would scroll and the firefighters can route to a fire would be able to determine where the hydrants were located.  And all of that was done by hand as well.
      And when I first came on, the fire department over 30 years ago, these were still in some fire engines.  But they were done so well and they were so accurate that people didn't want to take them out.
      And the point I do want to make is cities like Tacoma that have publicly owned water systems usually have a pad and continue to have good data about the water system and about the location of hydrants and different pressure systems.
      We should be had happy to note we have modernized over the years, we don't have horses anymore, and we no longer rely on paper maps for dispatching.  This is a photo from our dispatch center that's a dispatcher who's looking at the dispatch screen on his left, the one with the black background.  But to the right, there is the electronic map of our service area.  And it's a dynamic system because these red dots are the actual fire engines and fire trucks moving around our system.  And, for example, this one right here is going 30 miles an hour, the others are stopped.  But we dispatch no longer by the closest fire station but by the closest available fire engine or ladder.  So because it's important if you're having a heart attack or there's an emergency and the time is of the essence, you want the closest firefighters not closest fire station because those firefighters may not be at that station or there could be a fire engine going across town for another reason that's closer.
      We're the only agency who uses that.  It's called AVL, or automatic vehicle location and a lot of that is automatic vehicle routing.  But this is an example of authoritative maps from the water department and from the street file along with the dynamic system that allows us to do what we do.
      And then if you drill down and they open up the right screen, guess what?  Hydrants are important, still important and there they are because the maps and data from the water system is put into this computer dispatch system and the dispatchers can tell the crews on the way to the fire where the hydrants are.  Just think about how much time that saves.  So firefighters instead of stopping to look at the map, stopping to look something up where the hydrant would be, hear from the dispatcher where the hydrants are located close to the fire.  And that helps us be an aggressive fire department because we save a few seconds doing that.
      So reason number two why open mapping would be important for us is we expand our mapping.  We use mapping for decision-making.  We had to make a decision -- I was considering moving one of our ladder companies, we only had four of those from one station to station 9 to station 13.  And the ladder companies are very important for rescue.  So we had a number of quite a few as you can see from the dots of the maps of buildings without sprinkler coverage meaning they don't have fire sprinklers.  They're old buildings or they haven't modeled sufficiently enough to have fire sprinklers.  And I'm particularly concerned by the ones in blue because those are the ones above where our ladders can reach.  So we want to make sure in our deployment model, our deployment one that we have enough resources that we can rescue folks if there should be a fire along those top floors.
      We've also used expanded our use of mapping for station location.  We've looked at opening a new station on the tide flats, and we use GIS to look at the particular response time coverage that would provide.  We use GIS for -- in mapping for other decision-making such as a performance monitoring, making sure that we're doing our response times, they need to be the way they are and finding out those areas of town where our response times are not as good and then maybe targeting those areas for AED, placement and fire education.  And we've done something really interesting recently is used mapping for equitably.
      So you wouldn't think so much that the fire department would be concerned that we're providing our services equitably across our service area.  Other city departments definitely look at that.  9-1-1 is fairly accessible, and if you look at our 9-1-1 calls, we're pretty well spread out through our service area.  But we do provide emergency services and one of those is CPR training.  So we had our GIS intern, Jasmine, she's right over there.  Jasmine, she produced a map of the participants, geo-located map of the participants for our CPR training were coming from, and sure enough we found that on the east side of Tacoma, we weren't getting the same participation rate as we were from let's say the north end or left side, which are more affluent areas of town.  So that became part of our budget process and we are looking at funding to have a second CPR -- we do once a year and have other CPR training but the big event is CPR Sunday.  But instead of doing it in one particular location, we're going to have two location because the maps showed we weren't supplying that or providing that service equitably across our service area.
      And I think reason number three is we simply don't have the resources to collect and even analyze all the data that we need to continue to do a good job for the citizens.  And that has a lot to do with the great recession.  In the last -- well, since 2008, we've lost 55 firefighter positions.  And our call volume and demand for our services continues to go up.  So this is a photo that I actually took last night when I came home.  And this is a two-bay station.  One's out already and the second one's heading out the door.  And this station goes on a lot of calls.  It's rare to find them in the house.  Which means they really don't have the opportunity to do much more than respond to emergency medical calls, train do that important hands-on training that's necessary to be an aggressive firefighter, do the inspections they need to do, do the emergency medical services training that they need to do, they really don't have time to collect the data that we would like to have to continue to move our department forward.
      So now you know why a fire service like the City of Tacoma fire department would be very much interested in volunteer geographic information.
      So what might that information be that we're looking for?
      Well, we can all agree fire hydrants are notable.  And I think any fire service that doesn't have the location of its fire hydrants readily mapped for firefighters to used, that would be the primary thing and most important thing to accomplish.  But as I said, and I think there are a lot of areas probably throughout the world that could really use that kind of information well mapped.
      But from a municipalities that have had their location pretty well established, the question is what else do we need?
      And we've been -- I talked about expanding our use of mapping and having intern from the University of Washington Tacoma program.  We established a connection with the University of Washington Tacoma GIS program, the masters in geotechnical -- what is it?
      >> Geo spatial technology.
      >> Geo spatial technology.  I don't want to just say the GIS program but geo spatial technology.  Professor Ricker and I don't know who saw her presentation yesterday on discourses and drones talked to me about the maps.  So I looked at it and there's open fire maps.  And my response to her is, you know, that's great but there's more, and we need more than just fire hydrant location because we've known where fire hydrants have been for a long time.  And her response is, well, guess what?  There's an OSM conference in Seattle this summer and why don't you go ahead and submit a presentation idea, so you can have her to blame for the reason I'm here right now.  I'm doing it myself.
      But what else is notable besides fire hydrants?  And I chose this photograph for a reason if anybody from Tacoma recognizes, this is right park, and if you've been walking through right park, just about every tree except the ones like that small one in front have tags on them that tell you what type of tree they are.  So last year -- yesterday the discussion was how far -- how deeply do you want to map into your city?  What really -- you know, what becomes important?  And what needs to be notable?  And what's the information that you want mapped?  Well, for emergency work, the type of work we do, it's probably the most obvious things.  So, for example, this is a giant red oak at Wright park and state champion tree, so of course that's going to be something important to map.
      And for us, it would be things that would impede our ability to get to emergency scene.  So remember fire department, we want to be there quickly, fire grows quickly, we want to get inside, we want to get on top, we want to get water connection, we want to put the fire out before it spreads.  So things that slow us down, cobblestone streets, and traffic circles or traffic speed bumps, those would definitely be things that would be helpful for us to have mapped because they're not part of the regular street file that we have access to.
      And then on the scene once we're on the scene, our firefighters arrive on the scene, they don't go crashing through the door initially.  Someone does a 360 to check to see what are the dangerous things, the hazardous things immediately around the fire that if the fire were to spread, could cause a problem or these things could cause a problem to the primary fire.
      And I just chose one section, which would be fuels.  And of course propane tanks, natural gas, and diesel are things that can be around buildings that we really want to know about.
      And I do want to talk about propane a little bit because of all things, propane tanks are probably the most important for me.  You hear about natural gas explosions, there was one up in Seattle elsewhere recently and what can happen is natural gas leaks inside a confined space, it reaches its -- the concentration is flammability range, and it's, like, 15 -- 15%.  There's an ignition source, it will explode.  Propane doesn't need to be confined to explode.  Moreover natural gas lighter than air, it escapes, disburses into the atmosphere but propane is heavier than air, it will follow the radiant until it finds an ignition source.  And if everything is right, an explosion can ensue and that's what happened to us in 2008 at the Founder where there was an explosion because a truck was filling up a propane tank and there was a problem it with the hose, propane leaked, an initial explosion, and finally a very large explosion that rocked the community when the truck itself exploded.
      So I'm very much concerned about propane tanks of all sizes that are fixed.  Because small barbecue propane tank if it's next to a fire, you can pick it up and move it away from a fire.  But if it's a fixed tank, not so much.  And where we are -- I have my particular concern is right where a business abuts a residential area and these are examples of two gas stations.  The gas station has a propane tank at the edge of its property.  But right on either side of the property is a residence.
      So we would very much like to know, and we know where a lot of these are, but it's very important when a fire happens, that we know that that tank is outside, and it would be very helpful for the firefighters to hear en route to the fire, like, they know where here's where the hydrants are if they could hear from our dispatch center where things like propane tanks are.
      And we had it documented in our inspection and the city does of the gas station, but the relation that there's a residence next door may not be obvious from that piece of information and a map is an ideal thing that shows how close the propane tank is to a residence.
      We also do nonemergency work.  So we're willing and be very much interested in mapping, continue the metaphor, less important trees.  This is mountain ash.  I walked through Wright park with my wife Melissa, she always gets -- identifies a tree long before I can see what the tag is.  I always have to look at the tag.
      But along those lines, we also do plant, and we're coming up with a hazard risk assessment.  And in that, we're looking at a lot of different things and that would lend itself to different, more extensive data about a service area and the top one I don't know if you can see that, probably too small.  That's where the bridges are in Tacoma, and you can see that's a very birds eye view of it.  And then also down the second one is another map in here which is trails and pedestrian ways in the city.  But that's about the level of detail we have now.  So that could be very much expanded with volunteer information.
      And then we do other things besides emergency response.  We have other roles, emergency management, disaster preparedness, plan review and fire code management, so all of those things would be for volunteer geographical information.  But really what I want to leave you with is there's a lot of work that can be done that firefighters would be very much interested in.  But most important work are things related to emergency response and emergencies we do.  Those would be things like impediments on the way to fires, like cobblestone streets and traffic hazards and all of those immediately leading the fire incident.  So with that, any questions for me?
      >> You've got 15 fire stations, you've got 388 employees, how many fire hydrants do you have?  I've never had a --
      >> And I won't even guess how many there are.
      >> No, you don't.  So one thing I noticed on your map, you've got all red fire hydrants.  Now, with my work a dozen or so fire departments, we change the color of our maps according to --
      >> Pressure.
      >> Volume.
      >> And generating, you know?  So you get a green one, yellow one, red one, and then when you're going to the incident, you could -- stage around that big one most bang for your buck.
      >> Right.  So in Tacoma, we are very fortunate with Tacoma water.  And the water system is extremely good.  So when I first started with Tacoma fire department, we had to learn different types of hydrants there were green top ones, yellow tops, and red tops depending on volume and pressure.  And right now they're pretty much virtually all the same.  They're all top level.  So when you look at hydrants now, the public hydrants are all very good.  They all have very good pressure for the most part.  So really that for us that isn't really a distinction of do we want to grab the hydrant.  It's really they're all pretty much the same.  We do run into difficulties in private hydrants, parks, sometimes private hydrants on the port, the terminals, those could be concern, and mostly they don't exercise them as much and maintain them as much and as routinely as --
      >> And maybe they have four inch line instead of six inch.
      >> Exactly.  Yeah.
      >> A friend of mine is an emergency manager.
      >> I'll get right be back to you.
      >> Is a dispatch software directly tied into OSM?
      >> No.  It is not.
      >> How is this information getting relayed to the firefighters then?
      >> So we would have it -- so we're not using OSM right now.  The dispatch system we have is Northrop Grumman system, kind of the end of its life, we have more functionality.  It's still the detail we would need.  The way I envision OSM, and I'm when it comes to OSM, I've said about four valued things about it, I'll say a fifth one now, we would have that initially as a separate system.  And then ultimately what we would like to do is feed that information into the other system.
      >> So right now a dispatcher just opens up a separate browser window with OSM and --
      >> We don't have OSM running right now.  We do not.  But that's what I could imagine it would be.
      >> Next speaker get set up and we could still do questions so if our next speaker could get set up, we could do a few more questions while they do that.
      >> Friends of mine is an emergency manager in New Zealand, and he did his masters thesis on building interior information.  He was collecting information about where is the environmental control panel, where are the necessary keys, and I was asking him about 3D information like stairwells and that kind of thing.  Is that at all useful?
      >> It is.  And we do in addition to exterior mapping, we also map and have plans of buildings.  And so firefighters carry books of high-rises, for example, or complex buildings and a lot of that detail is in the books.  But they're still hand drawn, and we would really like to move past that.
      >> Verizon had an advertising campaign where they showed firefighters using a heads-up display, 3D map of where all the -- everything was.
      >> Good stuff.  Again, thank you very much for your time this afternoon.  It was really a privilege for me to be able to come here and talk to you and talk about what the needs of the fire service would be when it comes to open maps and volunteer geographic information.  So thank you very much.
      [Applause]