Multi-company incident command drills

Putting several companies on one incident, with a real command structure and real radio traffic, without moving a single piece of apparatus.

The problem with multi-company training

Most of what goes wrong on a working fire goes wrong between companies rather than inside one, which means the skills worth drilling are the ones that only appear when several units are on the same incident at the same time. Assignments get missed, a company freelances, command loses track of who is where, or two units end up working the same side.

Those are exactly the problems a single-company drill cannot produce. Getting three or four companies in one place for training is expensive, it takes units out of service, and it usually has to be scheduled far enough ahead that the people who most needed to be there are on another shift by the time it happens.

How this helps

Because members join a drill from their own devices with a session code, the companies do not have to be in the same room, or even in the same station. Everyone can stay in quarters and remain available for calls, and the drill still has the shape of a real incident.

Each responding unit arrives on its own response time rather than all at once, so crews see the scene when their rig would have gotten there and not before. This matters more than it sounds: it is what produces the gap where command is working with incomplete information, which is the condition most of the interesting decisions are made under. Command assigns companies from the command board, and assignments are visible to the crews that receive them.

The radio is half duplex, so one unit transmits at a time and the channel reads busy when somebody else is on the air. Crews have to wait for a gap the way they would on a real channel, which is a constraint that shapes behavior far more than any instruction about radio discipline would.

You can also mark where you intend apparatus to be positioned before the companies arrive. Anything that ends up spotted away from that plan is flagged for the debrief, so the conversation about the second due engine blocking the aerial happens with a picture in front of everyone rather than from memory.

Bringing in a neighboring department

If the incident you want to drill would draw mutual aid in real life, you can link with a neighboring department and open a drill to them. Their members join from their own sessions list without needing a code, and the hours they spend go home to their own training records rather than into yours. Each department's scenarios and evaluations stay its own, which is usually the sticking point when two agencies try to train together.

Reading it back afterward

When the exercise ends, the record is sealed and becomes an exact replay: the scene as it changed, every assignment, every arrival, and the radio traffic transcribed along the timeline. The crews can gather in a review room with open voice while the instructor drives the playback and marks up the scene.

This is where multi-company drills pay for themselves, because you can stop at the moment the assignment was missed and show it, rather than describing it. The full walk-through of a drill covers the whole cycle in more detail.

Seeing it for yourself

If this sounds like the problem you are trying to solve, the quickest way to judge it is to watch one drill from beginning to end. We will walk through building a scenario on an address you choose, running it live, and reading the after-action review afterward. Request a demo and we will email you to arrange a time, usually within 24 hours. One subscription includes everything described on this page, at $49 a month or $499 a year per block of 30 seats.