Smart Firefighting
Smart Firefighting Podcast covers real-world deployments of smart technologies through conversations with technologists, innovators, companies, and forward-thinking public safety and government agencies. Learn from interviews with leaders as they share their insights and offer their expertise every week! Host Kevin Sofen is a co-founding member of the Smart First Responder Community who loves to explore change management and technology in public safety.
Episodes
After a hurricane, a tornado or a wildfire, search and rescue teams need three answers fast. Where do we need to search? Where have we already searched? Where do we go next? SARCOP, the Search and Rescue Common Operating Platform, exists to answer those questions on a map.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry expert...
Every fire department already owns years of CAD and RMS data. Most of it sits untouched…
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Craig Hiltz of Darkhorse turns that data into a digital twin of the response system, so a chief can...
For decades the fire service has answered bigger fires with one move: more water. Bigger lines, bigger turrets, bigger flows. Modern fires have outgrown that equation.
In wind driven wildfires, traditional fog streams erode before they reach the flame front. Crews end up battling the nozzle instead of the fire.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire...
Most fire crews get few real repetitions on search and rescue. The calls are rare. The training is expensive. It takes companies out of service, and it adds injury and exposure risk.
San Diego Fire-Rescue built a different path.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own ...
Every disaster review finds the same failure: communication. Crews on 9/11 passed handwritten notes. Agencies at the LA wildfires could not talk across radio bands. During Hurricane Maria, restoration trucks sat at a pier while their ship steamed away.
The pattern repeats because the lessons never reach the next operation.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via in...
Wildland fires are bigger and faster than they were 20 years ago. Much of the gear on the line has not kept up. A broken shovel. A pack that does not fit. Standard issue equipment that looks 50 years old because it basically is…
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your ver...
The fire service has spent years turning hazmat into either a horror movie or a checklist. Jake Ryks thinks both are wrong.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Jake Ryks is a firefighter and hazmat specialist with the St. Paul Fire Depar...
Society wants an Olympic athlete neurosurgeon on every call. That superhero may have already saved the day ten times this week, at two in the morning, on no sleep. Nobody sees the beating on the inside.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy...
The biggest constraint most fire departments face is not money. It is being shorthanded. Over 90% of a typical fire budget goes to personnel, which leaves almost nothing for the next great tool and no spare bandwidth to chase every vendor at the trade show.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower Y...
Most first responder vehicles are full of technology that does not talk to itself. A dash cam here. A radio there. An MDT, a license plate reader, lights and sirens, all from different makers, all siloed. The data exists. It just never lands in one place where anyone can use it.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry ...
Bailey Farren is the co-founder and CEO of Perimeter. In 2017 she was evacuated from the Tubbs Fire, and what she saw that night, people with no way to know where the danger was or where to go, became the problem she has spent the better part of a decade solving.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that emp...
Bobby Banome is an FDNY firefighter from Staten Island who got tired of arriving at fires without the information his crew needed. So he built something.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Eleven years ago, Bobby was a probie on a compa...
The secondary market for fire apparatus runs on Facebook groups, newspaper classifieds, and local auctions. A small town in Texas budgeted $100,000 for a used truck sale. Garage got them $1.3 million. That is what happens when you put infrastructure behind a market that has never had any.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology...
Firefighters train all year, but most of it is death by PowerPoint. Evan Sitler-Bates and Drew MacNeil, co-founders of XpertVR, are building a different answer: immersive virtual reality simulations where firefighters actually do the work instead of watching someone describe it.
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry ...
What does leadership really look like when lives are on the line?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaste...
It’s okay to not be okay. The question is, who notices?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaster Re...
What happens when fire protection standards do not apply?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaster Resili...
What does risk really mean when the stakes are rising for entire communities?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute...
How do you prepare firefighters for risks that did not exist 10 years ago?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.
Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute fo...
What starts as a routine task on the fireground can quickly turn into a life threatening moment. For Matt Simmonds, that moment came while rolling hose after a fire, when a passing vehicle nearly struck his crew.
That close call sparked a question that many firefighters have quietly accepted for years. Is this really the safest way to do this job, or is there a better way?
Hello Smart Firefighting Community!
Welcome to another epis...
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