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Artificial intelligence is transforming emergency response by helping firefighters train smarter, prepare for real-world scenarios, and make faster decisions before arriving on scene. From realistic fire simulations to advanced medical training, technology is changing how first responders prepare to save lives.
How has technology changed emergency response over the last decade? And what do you think AI will change in this service?
SPEAKER_00
Well, AI, that's yeah. Um we're actually, I mean, technology has been great. I mean, to be honest with you, we use it in a lot of training. Um so like right now we have um, I mean, the mobile data terminal or MVT isn't very new. Um we don't have those yet, but we're using iPads for that sort of a thing. And basically we have like um an alert system uh or an app, you know, so that when we're dispatched, that app tones off, and you know, we can look at everything that's that's going on, you know, notes that the dispatcher can enter in. Um, you know, so it could be certain things that maybe they don't want to say over the radio because people in Scannerland are kind of hearing it. It could be some sensitive uh subject matter, so they'll just type in some notes and then we can look at that and get more information on what we're going on. Um those programs also have you know, like it'll use Google Maps where we can pop up where the location of the incident is, and we have I'm gonna keep hitting this thing. Oh, you're good. We have um like our hydrant locations uh entered into that. So we can pull up like a Google map view of a house or uh a strip mall. We can see where the hydrants are at. So while we're in route, we can say, okay, there's a hydrant here, hydrant there, you know. A lot of it we you know kind of know where they're at anyway. Right. Um we can use it for pre-planting. Um we have some programs where it'll populate the square footage of the building, do some calculations, and it will tell you based on the square footage, this is what your fire flow needs to be. So we kind of have an idea how many gallons per minute we need to start flowing once we arrive on scene. Um so we've used it for that. AI, there's uh a program that one of our guys used not too long ago. I didn't even know we had it uh until I saw him using it, but they went around, they they drove around our local area and they took pictures of our buildings here in town, some of our own houses, our own churches, schools, uh, some of our commercial buildings, and they was able to put that into this training program. And this program would put like fire coming out of the windows, smoke, and then you could type in what conditions do you want? You want light smoke, you want heavy smoke, do you want a fully involved fire on this side of the house, or do you just want fire coming out of this window, smoke coming out of that window? And then it wasn't just like a drawing, it was like actual like AI flames, you know, that look pretty realistic. Um and then you use that, and then they, you know, the the guy doing a class can say, okay, this is what you roll up on. You know, tell me what you would do. So then that gets the guy who is you know the officer in the truck. He can look at that and say, okay, I've got, you know, and of course, you know, we're we're simulating radio traffic, you know, saying, you know, I'm on the scene of a two-story residential structure, I've got heavy smoke showing out of the A side division one window, and and uh, you know, fire coming out of the B side, you know, whatever window. So we can use those without going and burning up a house. And it actually gives, you know, the guy looking at it uh to make a decision based on what he's seeing instead of someone saying, you know, reading paper, okay, you arrive at this house, you see heavy smoke coming from the top story window. You know, then you're trying to picture in your head, okay, what's what how what's the smoke gonna look like? Maybe heavy smoke, is it brown smoke? Is it white? Is it dark black? You know, so you can you can change these programs to come up with certain scenarios to determine how you're going to respond to it and then what you're gonna have your guys do. So wow, that's awesome.
SPEAKER_01
It makes it realistic too.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, especially if you're using buildings in your area, you're familiar with technology is pretty amazing. Yeah. You know, and and I not to ramble on here, but on the medical side of things, you know, I mean, we have um there's mannequins out there, you know, that uh will actually they're hooked up to a computer, and the uh the assessor can can give, can type in a symptom. He can type in, you know, I want this mannequin to be in a fib. You know, so we can look at the monitor and we can you're assessing just like a real person. They can make it breathe, they can make it sweat, they can make him cough, they can make him dry heave, they can make him cry, they can make him wait through touch, hear, they can make it personally scream. I mean it's it's it's amazing the stuff they come up with.
