The North Aurora Fire Protection District is the first fire department in the nation to allow its residents to complete a fire preplan for their residence on line.

A pre-plan is a report about a building or structure that contains all the information that a firefighter or incident commander would need if an incident were to arise at that location. The document contains information such as building size, number of floors, how the building is constructed, what materials were used during the construction of the building, how many occupants are in the building typically and where any hazardous materials are located. Traditionally, fire departments have limited the collection of preplan information to commercial buildings. The process in the past has been done by fire crews in conjunction with annual fire safety inspections. Once completed, the crews would take the information and place paper copies in binders and placed the binders in the fire engine. As North Aurora grows the process has become very cumbersome while taking a lot of space for all the binders in the fire engine.

To address the problem, North Aurora teamed up with Realview LLC to create a solution to solve the problem. Realview LLC created a comprehensive computer program for the entire department’s preplan and fire inspection needs. The computerized preplan allows for firefighters and command staff to have instant access to preplans of buildings via computer instead of having to flip through bulky binders. The computerized preplans contain much more information than the paper preplans ever had. This allows for firefighters to make decisions more effectively on an emergency incident because they don’t have to search for valuable information. This means firefighters can react quicker to saving lives and property while reducing the risk to themselves.

By computerizing our preplans it gives us the opportunity to offer residents the ability to preplan their private residence. Residents will access our website via www.nafd.org and follow the link to residential preplan. This will take you the preplan website. Once there, you will be asked to register into the system. This information is used to verify that only residents are inputting information. The information in kept confidential and not shared with other companies. After your registration you will be asked to answer several questions about your residence. After answering the questions you will submit the form and it will download into our preplan system. In the event a firefighter would need to respond to your residence they will have the information you submitted. Once registered, you can go back and change your information at anytime.

If you have any questions feel free to contact Bureau Chief Mark Bozik at 630-897-9698 or by e-mail at mbozik@nafd.org