The map: hydrants, landing zones, and pre-incident plans
What is on the map
Each kind of pin has its own shape, so you can tell them apart at a glance and in daylight:
- The call — a red marker pointing at the address.
- Hydrants — a hydrant symbol. Tap for size, flow and colour class. An out-of-service hydrant is struck through.
- Landing zones — a helicopter. Tap for surface, dimensions, approach and obstructions.
- Hazards and access points — hazards, Knox boxes, keys, gates, utility shutoffs, mile markers and other water supply, each with its own icon.
- Pre-incident plans — a yellow warning triangle. Tap for Knox box, FDC, access, hazards and shutoffs.
- Responders — a person. Yours is a different colour and labelled You.
What a hydrant's colour means
If the hydrant has been flow tested, it is drawn in its NFPA 291 class colour and the card names the class — light blue for 1,500 GPM and up, green for 1,000–1,499, orange for 500–999, red for under 500.
If it has not been flow tested, it is drawn in whatever colour your department already used for it and the card says “flow not tested”. That distinction matters: a colour carried over from an old system is just how the pin was drawn, not a measurement. Most hydrants imported from Active911 are in this state until someone runs a flow test.
Zoomed out, some pins are hidden
A full district can hold hundreds of hydrants, and zoomed out they turn into a solid mass that hides what you are looking for. So hydrants, hazards and access points only appear once you zoom in far enough — landing zones and water supply appear earliest, small things like Knox boxes and gates appear last.
Calls and people are never hidden. They show at every zoom level, always. There is also a Calls only switch on the website map if you want everything else out of the way.
Sharing between departments
Hydrants and landing zones are shared across departments. They are physical facts about a place, and on a mutual-aid call the nearest water is the nearest water. When a pin came from another department it says via their name, so you know whose record it is and who to tell if it is wrong. You cannot edit another department's records.
Pre-incident plans are different. They are only shared where both departments have agreed a mutual-aid link and the owning department has specifically ticked pre-plan sharing. They carry building details, so they are never shared platform-wide.
Navigating
Open in maps hands the call to whatever navigation app you use. Where dispatch gave us coordinates, it navigates to those coordinates and uses the address only as the label on the pin. That is deliberate: letting the navigation app re-interpret the text once sent a crew to a similarly named street instead of the one they were dispatched to. Where there are no coordinates — for example a dispatch that gives only cross streets — it falls back to sending the text.
Where the map opens
On your own pin if you are sharing; otherwise the most recent active call; otherwise your station.
Adding and exporting
Markers are added and exported on the website, not in the app — see Adding map markers and exporting your map data.