Editor’s note: Fire Chief Mark Novak and Oregon State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple will speak about the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and mutual aid at Fire-Rescue International 2026 on Friday, Aug. 14. Learn more about the event and how to register.
When I joined the fire service in 1984, our communities were not immune to large incidents and disasters, but the scale seemed manageable. When we talked about the “big one,” we were referring to a big structure fire or maybe a wildfire that burned a half-dozen homes. The scale of our disasters was not regularly deemed “historic.”
Then came September 11, 2001. Not only was this a national tragedy, but it was the first time in decades that we questioned our ability to manage any type of emergency.
The early 2000s also saw the stark increase in the number of mega-fires — wildfires that burned over 100,000 acres and often destroyed hundreds or even thousands of homes. Examples include the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which destroyed 18,000 structures and resulted in 85 fatalities, and the 2023 Lahaina Fire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, which destroyed 2,200 structures and killed over 100 people.
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We’ve also seen new levels of destruction with hurricanes. After Hurricane Katrina caused $125 billion in damage and over 1,800 deaths in 2005, the country has experienced several more hurricanes with catastrophic impact, namely hurricanes Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Ida and Ian.
The term “unprecedented” is now used so frequently that it has lost its impact across an entire generation so inundated with emergencies that it can only be described as the Disaster Generation.
Although preparing for disasters — particularly those that seem unmanageable — is a daunting task, there are two areas in which the fire service can collectively improve its level of preparedness: predictive intelligence and resource mobilization.
Predictive intelligence
The Disaster Generation will have to think more broadly about the impact of seemingly distant events on their community and their operations. The first step in that effort is understanding the risks our community faces.
While COVID-19 made us acutely aware of the fragility of the global supply chain, there are other technological and geopolitical events that can have local impacts. The recent disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has demonstrated the sensitivity of global markets to geopolitical actions. And while the disruption of the global oil supply is easy to understand, technological disruptions like the collapse of power grids and communication systems can initiate a chain of cascading events that can rapidly impact our ability to conduct the most basic activities necessary for daily living, much less maintain our emergency response capacity. Our foreign adversaries have developed sophisticated techniques to disrupt our power grids, communication systems, supply chain and even basic infrastructure like water treatment plants.
As such, we must approach preparedness with the mindset that it’s not a matter of if these disruptions will occur but rather when they will occur.
The fire service has access to local, national and global intelligence through fusion centers and other sources, but agencies must dedicate the time and resources needed to incorporate that information into short- and long-term planning.
That intelligence, combined with advances in data analysis and information sharing, can strengthen a department’s ability to anticipate and prepare for natural disasters. Crowdsourcing, early-detection systems and predictive modeling can provide senior staff and incident commanders with decision-support tools that estimate when a major incident may occur, the severity of its effects and the resources likely needed to manage it. This concept can be thought of as “augmented situational awareness,” in which situational awareness doesn’t just apply to the incident we are currently experiencing, but also the incidents we are likely to experience.
Resource mobilization
Beyond predictive intelligence tools, we need to expand the resources available to us.
While many fire agencies have a long history of using mutual and automatic aid to meet the challenges they face, we need to rethink the scale of disasters we will face and our ability to mobilize resources rapidly across the nation. There are existing systems to move resources between states, but these systems are too slow to meet the challenges we face.
The Incident Resource Ordering Capacity (IROC) is wildfire-centric and ignores resources that do not have wildland qualifications as established by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG). IROC is able to mobilize resources on a timeline of hours to days.
In some areas of the country, interstate resource mobilization uses the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). While EMAC can be effective when there is a long planning window or when resources are not needed immediately, it is slower than IROC, often taking days to weeks to mobilize resources.
It is remarkable that in the year 2026, we do not have a system for real-time tracking of fire service resources across the country. Many fire departments use automatic vehicle location (AVL), yet there is no state- or national-level integration of this data. Even if there was a national integration of this data, there is not a singular mutual-aid/mobilization agreement that would allow the rapid movement of fire resources throughout the country.
There are also administrative barriers such as reciprocity that prevent real-time mobilization of resources.
Finances create yet another obstacle. While most fire departments are able to support mutual aid for several hours, few can afford to provide assistance to other communities for longer periods without recovering their costs. There is currently no national-level mechanism for fire departments to be rapidly reimbursed for their expenses once they have exceeded their mutual-aid period.
The technology to have a real-time national mobilization system has been mastered by the ride-share industry. Uber and Lyft have real-time resource tracking that rapidly connects the closest, most appropriate resource to a request and automatically dispatches the resource. Similar systems have been developed for the trucking industry and food delivery. Despite this technological capacity, the fire service, with a mission that is arguably more important than food delivery or getting a ride to the airport, has no cohesive system for resource tracking and allocation at scale.
Call to action
The time has come for the fire service to develop an all-hazards, real-time national mobilization system that can identify every fire department resource in the country, categorize its capability and availability, and mobilize it to assist other communities. If we want to be upstream of disasters, this system must also have the ability to predict likely disasters and preposition resources, eliminating response delays and minimizing the impacts of disasters.
As the Disaster Generation, we have the unique opportunity to leverage technology and become the Preparedness Generation.
