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We are a very small department membership-wise, but have a fairly large and rural coverage area. Like a lot of rural departments, there's not a lot of budget for extras.
I know in the back of our heads we (on the department) think things like "it would be nice to have a dry hydrant near "XX"" or, "boy, we sure get a lot of accidents near "XXX" hill/curve/intersection"... But there is no way to easily analyze our run data to determine where needs actually are or where our most common areas for calls come from.
What I would like to be able to do is to map the location of our calls in a program. I know I can simply put "pushpins" on Google Earth, but I would like to be able to break it down further and use different markings for EMS and fire. We have one location that makes up a decent percentage of our run volume and it's both EMS and fire calls there. As incidents increase at a given location I would like to change the colors of the markers. Ideally fire and EMS would be separate layers that could then be overlaid together somehow. I want to be able to put at least a few details of the call with each marking.
We don't have any sort of CAD system in house, though I'm not sure what our county dispatch has. At this point I would be manually inputting the data every so often- we're only averaging 300 calls or less per year so it's not a monumental task at this point.
Are there any programs that are out there that are no-frills, cheap (free) and capable of doing what I want to do? Can I do it with Google Earth or Google Maps somehow? I know Earth has way more capabilities than I have used, so if I typed all this out and it can be done there, someone just call me stupid and lazy and I'll go figure it out there.
Thanks for any help/insight.
We are a very small department membership-wise, but have a fairly large and rural coverage area. Like a lot of rural departments, there's not a lot of budget for extras.
I know in the back of our heads we (on the department) think things like "it would be nice to have a dry hydrant near "XX"" or, "boy, we sure get a lot of accidents near "XXX" hill/curve/intersection"... But there is no way to easily analyze our run data to determine where needs actually are or where our most common areas for calls come from.
What I would like to be able to do is to map the location of our calls in a program. I know I can simply put "pushpins" on Google Earth, but I would like to be able to break it down further and use different markings for EMS and fire. We have one location that makes up a decent percentage of our run volume and it's both EMS and fire calls there. As incidents increase at a given location I would like to change the colors of the markers. Ideally fire and EMS would be separate layers that could then be overlaid together somehow. I want to be able to put at least a few details of the call with each marking.
We don't have any sort of CAD system in house, though I'm not sure what our county dispatch has. At this point I would be manually inputting the data every so often- we're only averaging 300 calls or less per year so it's not a monumental task at this point.
Are there any programs that are out there that are no-frills, cheap (free) and capable of doing what I want to do? Can I do it with Google Earth or Google Maps somehow? I know Earth has way more capabilities than I have used, so if I typed all this out and it can be done there, someone just call me stupid and lazy and I'll go figure it out there.
Thanks for any help/insight.
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