Mutual Aid Data Sharing — Your Neighbors' Pre-Plans and Hydrants, On Their Calls and Yours
When you roll into the next district on a mutual-aid call, you're fighting fire in a building you've never walked and pulling water from hydrants you've never flowed. The engineer is guessing at main size. The officer is asking dispatch for a gate code the home department already has in a binder. Command Established fixes that at the source: a neighboring department shares its hydrants and pre-plans with you, and they show up on your crews' tactical view the moment a call lands inside their coverage — live, read-only, and gone the instant either side ends the agreement.
What Your Crews See on a Mutual-Aid Call
Nothing to look up and nothing to remember. When an incident is dispatched, Command Established already builds a tactical picture around the address — the matched pre-plan, nearby plans, and the closest water sources. With a partner department sharing data, their records simply join that picture, ranked by distance right alongside your own and badged with the department that owns them:
- Partner hydrants in the closest-water-source list with drive time, flow class, rated GPM, main size, and the owner's field notes ("steamer cap seized — bring a spanner").
- Partner pre-plans matched to the address, or listed nearby when you have no plan of your own for that building.
- Pins on the tactical map, distinguished from your own and attributed in the callout.
The responding view on a live call — the partner department's pre-plans and hydrants ranked into the same lists as your own, each badged with who shared it.
No extra tab, no separate map layer to toggle, no second login. If the call is near a partner's hydrants or buildings, they're there. If it isn't, they aren't.
The Full Pre-Plan, Not a Summary
A pre-plan is written for whoever responds, so a responding partner gets what your own crews would have. Tap a shared plan and you get the complete operational record: construction and occupancy, hazmat entries, fire protection systems, utilities and shutoffs, apparatus placement, staging, water supply notes, building contacts, photos, and — because this is where the value lives — gate codes, Knox box locations, and key entry points.
A partner's pre-plan, opened from the call. Attribution first, then everything a crew needs — read-only, with no way to edit or export it.
Hydrants share what a pump operator needs standing at the hydrant: number, location, type, main size, status, NFPA class, rated GPM, static and residual pressure, outlets, colors, and field notes. The asset-management side of the record — owner contacts, inspection schedules, test history, photos — stays home.
Set Up in Five Minutes, With One Link
There's no paperwork to file inside the app and no directory to search. The department that owns the data creates a sharing link and sends it to the other chief however they'd normally reach them — a text, an email, across the table at the county chiefs' meeting.
- Open Settings → Mutual Aid Sharing as a department admin.
- Click Create sharing link. Name the department you're sending it to (that's just for your own records) and pick what to share: hydrants, pre-plans, or both. You can only share modules you actually run.
- Read the disclosure. Before the link exists, you see exactly what the other department will and won't be able to see — every field, in plain English.
- Copy the link and send it. It's shown once, works once, and expires in 7 days.
- Their admin opens the link and accepts. They see the same disclosure you did, sign in, and click Accept. Sharing is live immediately — no waiting on a second approval.
Creating a link — you see the full list of what the other department will and won't be able to see before the link exists.
What the receiving chief sees. Same disclosure, same wording — then Accept or Decline.
Sharing is one-directional: their crews see your data. If you want to see theirs, they send you a link the same way. Most neighbors set up both within the same phone call.
You Stay in Control
A sharing agreement should be as easy to end as it was to start, and it should be obvious at all times who can see what.
- One settings page shows every agreement — who you're sharing with, who's sharing with you, and any links you've sent that nobody has accepted yet.
- Either department can end sharing at any time. Click End sharing, confirm, done. The other side is notified.
- Ending it means ending it. The partner never receives a copy of your data — they see it live, from your records. End the agreement and it's gone from their screens. There's no export to chase down.
- Your admins are told the moment someone accepts a link, with the accepting department named and a link straight to the page where you can end it.
- Only active plans are shared. Drafts and archived plans never cross, and you can exclude any individual plan.
The whole picture in one place — outgoing, incoming, and outstanding links, each with a one-click way to end it.
Keep Any Plan Private
Some buildings you'll share with anyone who might respond. Some you won't — a facility with a sensitive occupant, a plan whose gate code you're contractually barred from passing outside your AHJ. Every pre-plan has an Exclude this plan from mutual aid sharing control, right next to the gate code field where you'll think of it. Tick it and partner departments never see that plan, even while you share the rest.
Per-plan exclusion lives beside the gate code, so the decision gets made when the code gets typed.
Hydrant sharing has its own built-in boundary: private hydrant owners' names and contact details, inspection and flow-test schedules, individual test records, and photos are never shared.
Built for the Data You're Trusting Someone With
Gate codes and keyholder phone numbers are exactly the kind of information that should never leak through a side door. Sharing is built so it can't:
- What you see in the disclosure is what they get. Nothing more crosses — not review history, not who edited a plan, not a hydrant's owner contact.
- On their calls, and nowhere else. Shared data appears only on a partner's incidents. It never shows up in their search, exports, printouts, NERIS reports, or anywhere it could be browsed or copied out.
- Read-only, always. A partner can look. There's no edit, print, or export on a shared record.
- Admins decide, on both sides. Only a department admin can create, accept, or end an agreement.
- A record of who looked. Every agreement created, accepted, declined, or ended shows up in both departments' activity logs, and each time a partner opens one of your pre-plans or hydrants, it's recorded in your audit trail.
- Links that can't linger. A sharing link works once and expires in 7 days. If it's never used, it can never be used.
Ready to Stop Guessing at the Neighbors' Hydrants?
Mutual aid data sharing is included with the Hydrants and Pre-Plans modules — no add-on, no per-partner fee. Start a free trial, build your pre-plans, and send your first sharing link to the department next door.