Casey here,

The Butano CERT team has received some mapping equipment and a modicum of training from Capt. Ari Delay of CalFire.

Most of the time the CalFire guys are local and are familiar with the area. During the fire season crews rotate up and down the state… and so there is an effort underway to provide them with updated hyper local maps.

So we’re mapping with their kit; and iPad with GPS, a Dual GPS puck and a funky app called GISKit Pro. In using that gear we found that most of the basemaps are rather… oddly off WRT the roads in our community

They take the resulting KML with a custom set of features of interest to the fire fighters, and push them into their ArcGIS system for eventual publication into a number of tactical systems. ( the trucks get tablets with GeoPDF files, for example. There are some mobile and PC based apps for deployment and kitting.)

We use regular basemaps when tagging, and have decided to correct the OSM maps for our actual road layout. That makes it easier for our volunteer team to accuratly map features given the difficulty of GPS reading in our canyons.