The Communal Forest Fire Committees (CCFF) are groups of volunteers who meet under the authority of the mayor, united by their interest in the protection of the forest and their environment against natural risks (forest fires). The CCFFs mainly provide assistance to the emergency services and those in charge of the forest, particularly in terms of warning, information, guidance, management and logistical support. To do this, they monitor the forest areas of their home municipality against fires throughout the year, on a vehicle patrol, or in a surveillance post, known as a lookout. These committees can then alert the competent authorities, most often by radio, and participate at their level in the rescue chain.
This municipal reserve can be made up of professional firefighters (Spp) or volunteer firefighters (Spv) who have ceased their activities, but also any volunteer who has the skills and abilities. The departmental service that fights the fire is the SDIS (fire and rescue). This organization manages both the volunteer firefighter and the professional firefighter.
The Communal Forest Fire Committees do not contribute to the operational fight devolved to the fire brigade but to the prevention of forest fires.
Ease of scheduling activities
Activity Management
Thanks to its activity calendar, the eBrigade tool makes it easy to manage and organize activities . This gives you the flexibility to schedule day-by-day forest patrols . Registering volunteers for these patrols is that simple; When creating an activity, each volunteer is notified by email. All they have to do is register immediately from home for the patrol they want via the app.
Their missions, on a voluntary basis, consist of carrying out surveillance patrols for fire prevention, a fire station is present high up in order to have an overall view of the forest area. It’s a daily commitment for the volunteers, they have to be on alert at all times. The number of interventions often increases due to weather conditions.
Rapid mobilization
Initially, the CCFF managed patrols manually, severely limiting the responsiveness of mobilizing volunteers. From now on, volunteers can mobilise if necessary in a very short time. The management of interventions and mobilization is optimized.
Indeed, patrols are mobilized quickly in the event of incipient fires to be able to extinguish forest fires, and evacuate civilians in the surrounding area (civil protection). Responsiveness is very important because the flames can spread very quickly.
Operational management
The use of eBrigade by the CCFF is the same as that made by first aid associations.
Overview
The features of eBrigade make it possible to manage operations efficiently. You have an overview of all the material resources available. You can manage all the inventories (vehicles, clothing, equipment) in one place and see if everything is operational.
Vehicle
For example, the CCFFs need to mobilize vehicles for their operation. They have the ability to see in real time which vehicles are being used and by whom.
Ebrigade allows you to have access to all the information about your vehicles:
- availability (engaged or not);
- status (operational or not);
- due date of the technical inspection and insurance. The application warns you before the due date by displaying itself in one of the widgets on the homepage.
Volunteer referral
The application references all volunteers, tracks their skills as well as their individual commitments, all human resources are thus centralized on the same interface. You can also find the availability of volunteers as well as the commitment of the staff to the activities. Similarly, it is possible to register the volunteers available on a patrol yourself. The manager thus has at his disposal in real time and at all times the human resources involved in monitoring activities.
Product Setup
Hierarchy
With eBrigade, you can prioritize, organize, give the right permissions to the right people and departments to be able to do the right thing and know everyone’s role in the organization. Indeed, you will be able to manage the access rights for each user of your application. It is a question of defining what each person who connects will be allowed to do, or not, to which features they will have access.
Individual and Personal Empowerment Level
Each access right brings together a certain number of permissions. To date, 77 different permissions exist (possibility to manage equipment, view personnel files, etc.). Each member of these CCFFs has their own level of authorisation, which is defined in advance. The levels of authorisation allow each person in charge to keep all the information up to date: for example, the volunteer manager fills in the individual files.
History
You can also create organizational charts to list all the members present, see the history of activities to draw up reports, or consult various statistics.
Jacky Vagner and Bernard Barataud
CCFF of Bormes les Mimosas
- What do you like most about eBrigade?
– Optimising the management of interventions and mobilizing, if necessary within short deadlines, volunteers
– The ease of scheduling patrols day by day. Registration of volunteers for these patrols by PC or smartphone.
– Personnel management
– The different levels of authorisations
– Reporting and the possibility to download them via Excel
- What for?
– The sending of emails when declaring an event allows each volunteer to register immediately according to his or her availability.
– The patrol manager has real-time and permanent access to the human resources involved.
– The levels of authorisation allow each manager to keep all the information up to date: For example, the volunteer manager fills in the individual sheets.
– The trombinoscope is also well appreciated to facilitate the integration of new entrants
– eBrigade is the go-to tool for a CCFF
- How much time would you estimate per day saved since using Brigade?
– Initially, the manual management of patrols was a time-consuming activity for each of the volunteers and managers, requiring physical trips to the CCFF office to manage their registrations.
This mode of operation also severely limited the reactivation of human resource mobilization.
With ebrigade, each volunteer registers in a few minutes, from home to the patrol of their choice.
– Information is always compliant and not redundant. Everything is available at the same time according to his authorization.
Undeniably, a lot of time saved with an organization that meets the committee’s emergency requirements with a reliable and non-redundant information base that allows us to carry out more assessments and analyses of our activities.
- What has eBrigade brought you since its use?
Volunteer Engagement Performance
Centralised management of human and material resources and committee activities:
Volunteer repository
Tracking individual commitments
Skills tracking
Document repository
Inventory management (vehicles, clothing, equipment)
Statistics
History to establish our activity reports
Communication by email with the volunteers (the addresses are always up to date)
Follow-up of volunteers hired the day before events (automatic now)
Name 3 situations where eBrigade has been indispensable to you
– Mobilization in record time of the intervention teams during the 17 red days of surveillance of the hills in the summer of 2020 and support for the victims of the Roya disaster (Alpes Maritimes) in October 2020.
– Control, over 3 rolling weeks, of volunteer registrations for daily patrols during the 11 weeks of the summer period.
– Individualized monitoring of the contributions and skill levels of each volunteer.
