About MapBook
One firefighter, one department, and a problem that wouldn't go away.
How it started
MapBook is written by Jared Wolff, a volunteer lieutenant with the Clinton Volunteer Fire Department in Clinton, Connecticut, for the department he responds with. He has been in the fire service since 2006 — 20 years — and MapBook has been running on real calls since 2025.
It started the way these things usually do — the map book in the truck was out of date, the hydrant list lived in a spreadsheet somebody kept on a laptop, and the pre-plans were in a binder that only got updated when someone remembered. None of that is unusual. Most departments run exactly like this, and most of the time it works fine. The problem is the times it doesn't, and those are the times that matter.
The commercial options didn't fit. The GIS platforms are built for planning departments and priced for cities. The alerting apps do alerting and nothing else, so you still need the binder. And nearly all of them assume a working data connection, which is an interesting assumption to make about a job that happens during storms, at the far end of the district, and in basements.
So MapBook got built one problem at a time. First the hydrants and the map. Then the pre-plans, because knowing where the water is only gets you halfway. Then the dispatch feed, because typing the address in while the truck is moving is absurd. Then push alerts, responding status, the display on the station wall, the radio stream. Every one of those exists because of something that happened on a call.
Why that matters to your department
🚒 The developer is on the call
When something in MapBook is slow, confusing, or wrong at 2am, it's wrong for the person who wrote it too. That's a much shorter feedback loop than a support ticket.
📶 Offline is the default assumption
Not a cached fallback added late. Your maps and pre-plans live on the device, edits wait their turn and send themselves when coverage returns, and nothing on screen needs a signal to draw.
🔓 Your data is yours
Full CSV and GeoJSON export any time, not just when you're leaving. If a better tool comes along, you should be able to take your district with you.
🧑🚒 Volunteer departments aren't an afterthought
Most of the country is protected by volunteers with no IT staff and no budget line for software. They get the same product as everyone else, for less money.
Where things honestly stand
MapBook is young. It is in daily use at the department it was built for, it handles live dispatch and alerting every day, and it is actively developed — but it is not yet running in a hundred departments, and you will not find a page of logos on this site.
If your department needs a vendor with a national footprint and a 24-hour call center, MapBook is not that yet, and it would be a waste of your time to pretend otherwise. If what you want is software built by someone who does this job, who will answer the phone himself, and who will build the thing your dispatch center needs because you asked — that is exactly what this is.
What that means in practice
It stays up
Dispatch ingest has to run unattended for months and be right at three in the morning. Everything underneath it was chosen for that, not for being interesting.
It wakes you up
Real apps from the App Store and Play Store, because that is the only kind of alert that gets through a locked phone at night. The same screens work in a browser on the truck and in quarters.
No meter running
Maps and aerial imagery are not billed per view, so nobody has to ration how often crews open the app — and the map still works with the phone in airplane mode.
Come see whether it fits
Twenty minutes on a department that runs on it daily. No sales team — you'll be talking to the person who wrote it.
Get in touch
Questions, feature requests, or a dispatch format you want supported — all of it lands in the same inbox and gets read.