Fire

The relationship between weather and emergency management (not to mention emergency preparedness) is fundamental and can be quite complicated. Weather causes many of the disasters that require an emergency response, yet awareness of conditions is essential for management of incidents unrelated to weather as the cause. For sure, meteorological awareness can have a profound effect managing the extent of destruction to life and property to...

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Much like military conflict, manmade and natural disasters present similar challenges of uncertainty, complexity and variability. These time-constrained and chaotic decision environments require rapid adaptation and an ability to pivot quickly to changes in the environment. The complexity of the event, coupled with time compressed decision space and the severity of the potential consequences, creates conditions that are unforgiving of error. Given the austere and...

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Ask anyone who has responded to a natural or manmade disaster and they will tell you, these events create the mother of all non-predictive inter-agency mashups. The multitude of agencies responding from outside of the incident area creates a need for hyperlocal services that assist in navigation, but also enable the finding and discovery of resources in the affected area of operation that can be...

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It's that time of year. Every fire season, millions of acres across the world burn during wildland fire events. Worse, between 2000 - 2019 alone, more than 400 wildland firefighters lost their lives fighting these fires while protecting civilians, homes, and forests. While the hazards faced on the fire line can include burnovers/entrapments, heat-related illnesses and injuries, smoke inhalation, vehicle-related injuries (including aircraft), slips, trips,...

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Blueforce's new EDGEbox for Linux will Ship With Recognitional Plugins Given the tempo of operations and the collapsed decision space presented by increasingly non-predictive threats, we continue to hear a common refrain: decision makers want nothing to do with a big data problem when on target, or at an incident site. The “Commander” is too often drowning in data, yet desires an explicit collision of “sense-making”...

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Small and medium-sized businesses now have access to situational awareness software that is military-grade, and affordable. Public safety agencies rely on operational intelligence to effectively respond to emergency situations. Technology can boost the amount of collectible intelligence and help synthesize and analyze it so informed decisions can be made.  Real-time location of essential personnel and assets is one of the cornerstones incident data that helps first...

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Blueforce is on a constant mission to find new and novel wearable devices and sensors for our military and public safety customers deployed around the world. Combining Blueforce with wearables enables a wide array of customer use cases to include COVID-19 pre-diagnosis medical monitoring, operational life safety, and human performance monitoring. When we learned of and then saw the new Garmin Tactix Delta, we knew...

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To help first responders handle the worldwide spread of COVID-19, Blueforce Development and Zebra have partnered closely to offer a situational awareness platform that can be rapidly deployed by law enforcement agencies. Blueforce provides an easy-to-use subscriber interface to securely connect with people, sensors, and AI services in seconds, using Zebra rugged mobile devices to capture data and remain connected in critical environments. Utilizing the...

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It’s the same kit we have deployed for more than 10 years for border counter-terrorism joint task forces. A kit that is airline checkable (46 lbs; 32" L x 20" W x 9" H) and provides communications, sensor fusion, and a distributed common operating picture that crosses domains, agencies, and networks. More importantly, a kit that isn’t confined to a single vehicle and can be...

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It has been called many names: distributed cloud, fog computing, and 4th generation data center, but with the impending mass deployment of 5G a variant of distributed cloud is more commonly referred to as "multi-access edge computing" or "MEC". The idea behind MEC is to deliver compute, bandwidth, and micro services much closer to the end user and IoT devices for faster and more informed...

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