The fire service uses mutual aid for every day incidents to large-scale disasters. It is critical for emergency personnel to have easy access to a mutual aid system for requesting, locating, and deploying response resources. The National Mutual Aid System (NMAS) is a partnership launched in 2017 between the best of three worlds: IAFC, the international fire service leader, Intermedix, a global lea
der of health and safety solutions, and Esri, a global leader in spatial analytics. NMAS takes mutual aid to the next level, creating a system where all users can access cutting-edge technology to request, geospatially locate, and strategically deploy response resources. NMAS leverages the technical innovation and expertise of Intermedix and Esri personnel, and combines it with decades of practical experience and success from state and local partners and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) through the IAFC network. NMAS uses Esri’s ArcGIS, a powerful location intelligence platform, and Intermedix’s WebEOC, crisis information management software, to manage and track emergency services resources during mutual aid responses. The use of Intermedix’s WebEOC and Esri’s ArcGIS platforms will provide unparalleled information sharing, decision support, and situational awareness capabilities to jurisdictions, regions and countries around the globe. Users will be able to visualize where resources are, where they need to go, and response times for real-time action decision making. NMAS will allow for real-time two-way data exchange between system administrators and responders both in transit and at incidents. An NMAS demonstration is scheduled for the 2018 IAFC Wildland Urban Interface Conference. The next steps for NMAS include a beta test in four states (CA, FL, TN, and UT) prior to a go-live which may run in parallel to existing systems in the in the initial phases. Following the beta testing phase, the NMAS Team will work on phased implementation for interested state and loca
