Fort Wayne Fire Alarm Box Running Cards, Allen County, Indiana

Browse the cards

Images of these Fort Wayne Fire Department Fire Alarm Box Running Cards were generously contributed by Don Weber, a retired Fort Wayne Fireman as well as volunteer curator of the Fire Fighter Photographs Collection of the library's "Community Album."

The description of Fire Alarm Running cards below is taken from the Boston Fire Historical Society's website at http://bostonfirehistory.org/fire-alarm/running-cards/.

Running Cards show which fire companies will respond to a particular firebox. Every address in the city is built into a database which in cross-referenced to the nearest firebox in the area. With the assignments to each firebox already pre-determined, the response to any address can be easily determined.

Running Cards have existed since the development of the Fire Alarm System. Every fire company cannot respond to every fire box. By predetermining a response pattern, the most efficient use of resources is accomplished in a timely fashion. By using street patterns, one-way streets, firehouse locations, bridges, highways, railroad tracks, and other physical barriers, the fire companies with the quickest possible response are pre-selected. For multiple alarms above the first alarm, the process includes determining a response to the fire location, and also to cover firehouses near the scene of the fire.

Every firehouse maintains a card file containing all the Running Cards. When an alarm is received in the firehouse, the firefighter on watch pulls the card for that Box and determines if the fire company or any other fire company in the firehouse is required to respond. Sometimes just the engine company or the ladder company may respond, while the other company does not, based on the Running Card.

From the "Glossary of Firefighting" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_firefighting:
Run card system: A system of pre-planning for fire protection in which information about specific detectors, hazards, or other emergency response plans is indexed by location, for rapid reference during an alarm.

Browse the cards