2020 Team Awareness Kit Deployment on the Grizzly Creek Fire
Channel: Colorado Center of Excellence, Advanced Technology
Date: 2020-12-01

In 2020 the U.S. Forest Service awarded a grant to the CoE to develop a TAK capability for wildland fire and conduct a pilot project deployment of the technology on a wildland fire. The CoE stood up a TAK server that ties all TAK users together and integrated this server with the Enterprise Geospatial Portal, a federally developed website containing fire maps and other intelligence. 

An opportunity to pilot TAK came in August 2020 on the Grizzly Creek Fire in Western Colorado. The CoE coordinated with the fire’s incident management team to deploy TAK to firefighters on the night shift, as well as on a division (a discrete geographic area) of the fire. A total of 28 phones were deployed with firefighters for 13 days. On average, firefighters’ positions were updated every 129 seconds. In addition, wildland firefighters participating in the pilot project received regular updates of incident maps and information on their phones through the TAK app. All firefighters surveyed on the deployment stated that TAK improved their situational awareness.