Halt and fight fire: Volunteer firefighter develops software to share

A volunteer firefighter from Pasadena, N.L., has developed software to help his department do its job better, and he wants to share it with other fire departments.

Lieut. Corey Lane of Pasadena Fire Rescue is the brains behind Fireshield,a web-based department management software.

"It's used to track everything from incident reports to our equipment to maintenance on our equipment, our personnel," he told CBC's Corner Brook Morning Show on Wednesday.

It tracks that stuff to make sure that we're well-trained and ready to go when we need to.- Corey Lane

"It tracks what we do every day, every week, at our normal training and when we're gone for weekends with [provincial] Fire and Emergency Services. It tracks that stuff to make sure that we're well-trained and ready to go when we need to."

Lane, who works in information technology,said he was inspired to create the software because he was amazed to learn, when he served as the fire department's secretary for a time, just how much tracking is needed and how much paperwork has to be done.

Can be accessed with cellphone

"I kinda took it upon myself to write a database to manage all that in a much simpler way," he said. The department still has paper records, but keeping track with software has made the job much easier.

"With this software, now, I can do it from my cellphone," he said. "I could sit here now and, within a minute or two, tell you exactly what I've done or what any of the members in the department have done and who was at every training session and who went to what fire schools away It's all in one place and on my phone."

The Pasadena department has used Lane's software for about three years now, and wants to share it with any other interested departments, but cautions it's more geared to smaller departments, and wouldn't be as effective for larger ones like the St. John's Regional Fire Department with greater needs for things like payroll management.

"It's really designed for our size fire department," Lanesaid.