At the Ready Staff w/ Alex Griffin, Firefighter 3, Gwinnett County Fire Services

It is with great pleasure 'At the Ready' shines the technology spotlight for September on a system designed by Firefighter 3 Alex Griffin of the Gwinnett County Fire Services in Atlanta. Alex is also the CEO of Griffin Command Systems. The spotlight shines brightly on Griffin’s Command Board. Alex Griffin used his 15 years of field experience to develop this capability. About 7 years ago, having worked many fires and other disasters, Griffin believed that there must be more that could be done to assist in incident management. There are many different incidents to which a fire department responds and Griffin’s command board helps meet incident management needs because it is tailorable to the specific incident.

As many incidents involve not just firefighters, but law enforcement, EMS, and EMA responders as well, Griffin’s system provides the ability to manage those personnel on a scene. With this, an incident manager gains more thorough situational awareness and can make better informed decisions about crews and individual players on a scene; who is deployed, who is searching, who is in recovery, and so on. Incident managers can also use the system to log events, benchmarks and other important specifics of an event, all of which are time-stamped and saved automatically up to 100 events.



Incident managers input the type of attack which, in the systems, defines the scene being handled. As chaotic as scenes are, an important feature of the system is the par slider. This feature gives visual and audible reminders to check on crews. The interval at which the reminders are given is adjustable to as frequently as every 1 minute or as high as 20 minutes. Once completed, the incident manager logs it as either Ok or Failed. Each par is time-stamped and logged in the event log. All of these features allow for personnel management which is backed up and available for future after action reviews and incident reconstruction.
The screen shots below offer several views into the capabilities of the system: