Built by the fire service.

01Who's behind this

I'm Seth Tata-Amato, a third-generation firefighter with the Revere Fire Department, assigned to Engine 4 / Ladder 2 at headquarters. Revere runs one of the highest call volumes in the country for a city its size, which means a lot of fires, a lot of stretches, and a lot of hydrants. Working, broken, buried, and missing.

I've worked with GIS exports, paper mapbooks passed down through the department, and homemade binders other guys have put together. None of them solve the problem. They're either out of date the day they're printed, locked inside a system no one on the line can update, or built by someone who's never had to find a hydrant at 3 in the morning.

Supply Line Fire is built on my off-duty time, by someone still riding the rig.

02The story

Supply Line Fire started because I got tired of flipping through mapbooks.

I'd gone through several versions made by guys in my department and a few I'd mocked up myself. Different binder layouts, different tab systems, different ways of organizing hydrants by district. Nothing felt right. The information was either stale, hard to find under pressure, or missing the hydrants that actually mattered on a given block.

When the driver of your piece is flying to an incident, you can't lag behind getting info to your officer. That's where the idea for an app came from: something fast, something built for the jumpseat, something that doesn't care whether the city ever updated its records.

So I began early trials and built an application I believe in and will proudly back up.

03Why it exists

The old method doesn't work. Paper mapbooks don't know which hydrants are out of service. They don't know which ones got added last month. They don't reflect the gap that's always existed between city water departments and the fire companies that actually need the data.

Supply Line Fire is built for the individual firefighter. Not the department, not the chief, not the city. Smaller departments especially don't have the budget for enterprise response software, and even the ones that do often end up with tools designed by people who've never ridden a piece of apparatus. This app is the tool I wanted on my own rig.

04What Supply Line Fire won't do

Boundaries we're committing to, in plain language:

• No department surveillance.
• No selling data.
• The individual firefighter is the customer.

05What's next

• App Store Launch Supply Line Fire is launching on the App Store for individual firefighters first. Jurisdiction coverage expands as guys in those areas request it — that's how the map grows.
• Active maintenance. After launch, the commitment is simple: active maintenance, real updates, and a real human answering email. No abandonware, no pivot to a different audience. Replies to email come from the founder. Bugs and pack issues get worked on directly, not triaged through a help desk.

If you want to be part of it, request coverage for your jurisdiction or email sethtataamato@supplylinefire.com.