[davidbanham]

I’m a bush fire fighter in Australia. We do make use of technology and we’re bringing more in but reliability and dependability is _so critical_.

All of my brigades trucks have iPads which are useful for accessing maps, running collaborative fireground apps like collector, firemapper or rfsBuddy, etc. All of these things are “nice to have” though. We don’t rely on it for anything we must have, because it fails from time to time.

We use apps like Rover and Bart to manage call outs. They’re great because we can see who’s responding, how far away they are, etc. We also all carry ancient pagers because they’re bulletproof and mobile phones aren’t. They’re served by a hardened transmission network where every tower has backup power in case the grid goes down.

Tech is great but in extreme environments like a wildfire I want to have a paper map with me and I want to know how to use it. Just in case.