08/31/2026
Green Bay Metro Fire covered the NFL Draft with 240,000 people packed into 100 acres. They knew where every crew was the whole time.
Battalion Chief Anthony Piontek runs TAK for the department. Team Awareness Kit, the shared mapping system that came out of the Air Force Research Laboratory and is now working its way into public safety.
A few things from this conversation that are worth your time:
🧀 They started small. GPS trackers on apparatus. That was it. Then a Packers game. Then another special event. Then the draft, where they were staffing hazmat and medical teams around the clock across three shifts. The younger members drove most of the expansion.
🗺️ The value showed up in what stopped happening. Piontek talks about the radio traffic that disappeared. You are not asking where are you and where did you go, because you are looking at it.
👩‍🚒 It works on a house fire too. He watches the third and fourth due rigs come in on the screen and moves them to a different hydrant before they commit.
👨‍💻 They own the whole stack. Their server, their software, their records, all inside the city, running on FirstNet. Part of that is sensitive medical and property records. Part of it is what they have watched happen to partner agencies that got held for ransom.
đź‘‹ The part most departments skip: they hired for it. A dedicated position inside their own IT department, someone with a military and communications background, instead of splitting a city IT person a thousand ways.
🔢 This is a 230-person department covering 100 square miles. If they can run this, the size excuse does not hold.
"The best technology for the fireground is the technology that gets out of the way."
Watch the full conversation: https://youtu.be/I14N57jJomI?si=n1JzxFo90vYXlyCt
Green Bay Metro Fire covered the NFL Draft with 240,000 people on 1...
