Emergency Services

Most buildings with residents who could not get themselves out keep that fact in a spreadsheet: who needs help, which apartment, who is on oxygen. It is printed when someone remembers, it is out of date the week after, and at two in the morning it is in a drawer in the office.

Emergency Services is that list, kept by the residents themselves, readable by the fire department, and able to run the roll call it exists for.

It is an add-on, off until it is switched on for a community.

What the list is

One row per resident, built from the household registry and each resident's own answer to a single question — would you need help getting out of the building? — so it can never drift from who actually lives there.

Each row carries:

• the apartment, and the floor the apartment number implies
• the resident's name
• whether they need help, do not, or are not sure
• anything they chose to flag: oxygen in use, a wheelchair, a walker, hard of hearing, low vision, a service animal
• anything else they typed
• the animals the household has declared, with whatever they wrote about them

The list is ordered top floor first, the way a crew works a building.

Three states matter, and the third is the one a spreadsheet always lost:

State	What it means
Needs assistance	The resident said yes
Unsure	The resident said they are not sure. Treated as a yes
Verify in person	Nobody has ever asked. No answer is on file

A resident who said they can get out on their own is counted but is not part of the roll call: checking off every apartment to find the handful that matter is what made the paper list unusable.

The animals

Pets a household has on file ride along on the list, and they get a section of their own — Animals in the building — on the screen, on the printed sheet and in the drill report.

That section covers every apartment with an animal, including the residents who said they can get out on their own: they can, and the cat cannot. A crew that would go back up the stairs for a dog is going to go whether or not anybody told them it was there, and the time to learn about it is before the door is forced.

Each animal reads as Dog — Rex (labrador), with whatever the household wrote about it after — "bolts for the stairs", "hides under the bed". They come from the pet records in the household registry, so there is no second list of animals to keep in step.

Only animals somebody declared can appear. An apartment missing from that section was never asked, and the list says so rather than letting a blank read as "no pets here".

Who can see it

Who	The list	The medical notes
Community admin, town admin, super admin	Yes, every floor	Yes
Emergency services (see below)	Yes, every floor	Yes
Your staff, on shift here	Yes, every floor	Only if you switch it on
A resident or staff member you designated	Their floors, while a roll call is running	Only if you switch it on
Everybody else, residents included	No	Their own answer only

Every read of the list is logged with the account, the building and the time.

The button in the top bar

Anybody who holds the list gets an Emergency Services button in the top bar of every page, and in the header of every screen in the app. Nobody opens a side menu and reads a nav at two in the morning.

It is a quiet outlined button most of the time. While a roll call is running it turns red and carries how many units are still unaccounted for — counted against that person's own floors, so a warden on the third floor is told "3 left on your floor" and not the building's number.

For a community admin the button is the way in, and the only one: there is no Emergency Services row in the side menu, because a second, quieter entry point is just somewhere to look first and be wrong. A fire department, who has no other navigation at all, keeps a menu row as well.

Everybody else has no button at all.

Your staff

Anybody on this community's staff reads the list for the whole building, whether or not a roll call is running. That is not a setting, and it is deliberate: the maintenance tech already in the building at 2am is the person who gets to the door first, and a groundskeeper who cannot find out who is on oxygen is a groundskeeper who carries somebody down the wrong stairs. Take it away by taking them off staff.

Staff do not get the pages behind the list — no drills, no departments, no drill log. They read the list, and they check units off while a roll call is running.

Designating someone to check people off

Emergency Services → Who holds this is where you name a resident or staff member to check units off: a floor warden with a clipboard, a live-in super with the whole building. Give them their floors, or leave the floors empty for the whole building.

They hold the list while a roll call is running and not between them — a designation is a job, not a standing permission. On an ordinary Tuesday the button opens a page saying so.

They cannot start a roll call, file one, send a report, or read the drill log. They check their own floors off while one is running, and that is the whole of it.

The medical notes

One switch, on the same page, and it is off until you turn it on.

Apartment, name, "needs help", who is helping and the declared animals are always on the list for anybody who holds it — masking those leaves a warden knocking on doors at random, which is worse for the resident than being listed, and a labrador in the back bedroom is not the resident's medical history. The conditions and the resident's own words sit behind the switch.

With it off, staff and designated residents see the row and a line saying Medical notes withheld. The list does not pretend there was nothing to withhold, and it does not show them a nought where the oxygen count goes. A printed copy says on its face that it is not the crew's copy.

With it on, they read the same list the fire department does.

CivicPort does the withholding on the server, not in the screen: a page that has been handed something it must not show is one keystroke from showing it.

Departments, and the people on them

A department exists once on the platform, not once per building. The same fire service covers every property in its town: Kirtland Commons and the apartment down the road are both in Deep River, the same engine answers both, and both read from that department's single roster.

So there are two separate acts, and keeping them apart is the whole design.

A community links a department. On Emergency Services → Departments, a community admin picks the department that covers them from the directory and sets their own terms: which buildings, when access ends, whether drill reports send themselves. Revoking the link ends access here and at none of that department's other properties. If the department is missing from the directory they can add it rather than wait — it works for them at once and is listed as waiting until the platform team confirms it or merges it into the record it duplicates.

The department keeps its people. Whoever runs the department adds and removes their own crew, and so can the platform team, from Administration → Emergency Departments → People. Everyone on that roster reads the evacuation list at every community the department is linked to, and at the next one to link it, with nobody invited twice. The dialog names those communities before anybody is added, so the list of buildings being handed over is never a surprise.

Two rules hold the roster together:

• The domain. A department may only take addresses at its own email domain — deepriverfd.gov. It is what makes one shared roster safe to hand seven properties: a chief cannot put a personal address on a list of vulnerable residents.
• The lead. One person on the roster runs it. They add and remove their own people and can appoint another lead, and the last lead cannot be removed, because a department with none strands itself.

A community admin can invite the first person to a department they have just linked, so a building can be onboarded in an evening without waiting on anybody. After that the department keeps its own roster.

Anyone added gets one email, sets a password, and lands on the evacuation list. In the mobile app they get three tabs — Evacuation, Drills, Account — and nothing else: no tickets, no residents, no community, no leases, no payments.

They can:

• read the evacuation list at every community their departments are linked to, medical notes included, whatever the community set for its own staff
• run a roll call and stamp each unit as it is accounted for
• read past drills and their reports

They cannot see anything else in the community, and the role reaches exactly the communities their departments are linked to — no more, and no fewer. Link a new building to the department and everybody on it has that list the same day; revoke the link and they lose it, there and nowhere else.

Nothing resident-facing, ever

An emergency services account is a member of the community behind the scenes — that is how the list knows which building — but it never sees the resident side: no dues or payments, no community board, no neighbour directory, no household records, no tickets. The pages are not merely hidden; typing the address in turns the account back to the evacuation list.

That holds even where the account has an address in the building, because these are usually shared shift logins — ladder3@ — and an address on the account is no proof of who is holding the phone. Somebody who both answers alarms and lives in the building keeps two logins: their own resident account for their home, and the department's for the list.

The one grant that is not taken away is administering the community. A community admin who is also a contact keeps the full admin app.

Roll call

Starting a roll call asks one question first: drill, or real incident? The two can never be told apart afterwards, so the choice is made up front.

Drill. Nothing leaves the property. Residents get one push saying it is a drill. Every screen carries an amber DRILL — not a real evacuation banner. Filing it writes a drill report.

Real incident. Every department with access is emailed the moment it starts, with a link to the live list.

While it runs, each unit gets one tap to mark it accounted for, and the time is stamped. A mistaken tap can be taken back. A unit nobody reached is asked why — no answer, not at home, declined, needed a crew — because that is the sentence the report needs and nobody remembers it an hour later.

Four people can tap: the office, the department on scene, your staff, and the residents you designated. A designated person can only tap the floors they were given, and the mark records who made it. Only the office and the department can call the all clear and file it.

A session that finds real smoke during a drill is a new session: end the drill, start an incident. The times already stamped belong to the drill, and a report that mixes the two is worth nothing to either.

Drills and the report

Drills lists every roll call the community has run, with the time to all clear, how many units were not reached, and the report.

Each community sets how often it means to drill (every 6 months by default). When one is overdue, the evacuation list and the drill log both say so, and so does the building card in the app.

The report is what a fire marshal asks for:

• the kind of drill, when the alarm sounded, when all clear was called, and the time between
• who ran it and who observed it
• the units on the list, how many were reached, how many were not
• every unit with its time and its outcome
• a follow-up list: every unit nobody reached, and why
• the animals declared in the building, counted and listed by apartment

Sending it

Three settings, narrowest last:

1. The community's default — Email the report to departments with access as soon as a drill is filed, on the Drills page. On unless turned off.
2. Each department's own setting — automatic, or I'll send reports to them myself, set when the department is linked and changeable on the Departments page. A department set to manual never gets an automatic report, whatever the community's default says.
3. The one-off hold — whoever files a drill can keep that one report in while someone reads it.

So a filed drill can honestly read "2 sent automatically · 1 waiting", and the one waiting shows a Send button for an admin. Sending by hand reaches every department, including the ones set to manual.

A drill never pages a department. The report is the only thing that leaves the property.

What residents do

Residents answer the question themselves, in My Household on the web or the Me tab in the app, under If the building is evacuated. They pick yes, no or not sure, tick anything responders should know, and can change the answer whenever they like.

An admin can record an answer for a resident who phones it in, the same way they can add a vehicle or an emergency contact on someone's behalf. The resident sees who confirmed it last and when.

The answer is visible to the community's admins and to the emergency departments they approve. It is never visible to neighbours, and it is not part of the resident directory.

Their pets are on the same list, and the screen says so where they answer the question: a household that keeps a dog on file in CivicPort has told the fire department about it. Nothing else from the household record — vehicles, documents, emergency contacts — goes anywhere near the evacuation list.

Keeping it right

The list carries the date it was last checked, and who checked it. An admin marks it checked from the bottom of the evacuation list.

The two things that make a list wrong are both visible on it: an apartment nobody has asked, and a drill nobody has run. Both are counted at the top of the page, which is the point — a list that says "2 to verify" is honest, and a list that quietly reads those two as "no" is the one that gets somebody hurt.

Switching it on

Emergency Services is an entitlement. A super admin turns it on for a community in Community Management, which:

• adds the Emergency Services button to the top bar for anybody who holds the list, the community's admins included
• lets an admin link the departments that cover the building, and designate residents and staff to check units off
• starts asking residents the evacuation question

Turning it off takes the button away and stops asking residents, and keeps every answer already given.