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What is MABAS

MABAS (Mutual Aid Box Alarm System) is a statewide mutual-aid network that lets any Illinois fire department—career, combination, or volunteer—rapidly summon help from hundreds of partner agencies using one common set of procedures. Its purpose can be summed up in four key functions:

  1. Fast, Pre-planned Resource Sharing
    • Every department creates “box cards” that list what equipment and staffing it will need for escalating alarms (e.g., structure fire, haz-mat, technical rescue).
    • When local resources are exhausted, dispatch simply “pulls the next box,” and MABAS automatically sends the exact companies, apparatus, and specialties requested—no phone calls, negotiations, or delays.
  2. Standardization & Interoperability
    • Radio frequencies, terminology, accountability tags, and incident-command protocols are uniform across 70+ MABAS divisions.
    • This common language allows crews from different counties to work seamlessly together at fires, mass-casualty incidents, tornadoes, pipeline leaks, or active-shooter/hostile events.
  3. Specialty Team Access & Statewide Assets
    • Member departments gain immediate access to specialized teams—Technical Rescue, Hazardous Materials, Water Rescue, Urban Search & Rescue (IL-TF1), Incident Management Teams, rehab and communications units—without having to fund them locally.
    • MABAS maintains regional equipment caches (light towers, tents, generators, air-handlers) and 25,000-gal. firefighting foam trailers for large petroleum or ethanol fires.
  4. Disaster Coordination & Cost Recovery
    • During federally declared disasters, MABAS coordinates fire-service deployments statewide and can export Illinois task forces to other states through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC).
    • The organization handles documentation so departments can be reimbursed for personnel, apparatus, and overtime costs.

Why It Matters

  • Surge Capacity: Small and mid-size departments instantly add engines, ambulances, and manpower when a routine call turns into a multiple-alarm event.
  • Cost-Effective: Agencies share resources instead of each buying and staffing every specialty.
  • Safety & Professionalism: Crews train to identical standards, improving firefighter safety and operational efficiency.
  • Community Assurance: Residents benefit from a fire-rescue system that can scale rapidly to any emergency—from a house fire to a chemical release—without regard to municipal borders.

In short, MABAS Illinois transforms individual fire departments into a single, statewide response network—delivering the right resources, to the right place, at the right time, every day.

Where Division 1 Fits Within the MABAS Illinois Framework

Aspect Division 1’s Role

Geographic footprint - Covers the dense collar-county suburbs northwest of Chicago—principally eastern DuPage and northern Cook Counties. Its departments protect a population of nearly one million in some of the state’s busiest EMS and fire corridors (I-90, I-290, I-355, O’Hare flight paths, rail hubs, large industrial parks).

Member agencies - 14 municipal and district fire departments (e.g., Arlington Heights, Hoffman Estates, Schaumburg, Bartlett, Elk Grove, Rolling Meadows, Palatine, Mount Prospect, Barrington, Wheeling, Inverness, Streamwood, Buffalo Grove, DesPlaines). These agencies share common box-card templates, dispatch agreements (NWCDS/RED Center/DU-COMM), and radio channels (IFERN/IFERN 2).

Core mutual-aid function - When any Division 1 department upgrades an alarm, the next-due engines, trucks, tenders, ambulances, chiefs, and specialty teams roll in automatically from fellow Division 1 members—before assets are requested from other divisions. This provides a rapid surge capacity for high-risk occupancies (O’Hare fringe, multi-story residential, chemical warehouses, mega-warehouses).

Special-team infrastructure - Division 1 hosts—or co-hosts—several MABAS statewide assets:
• Haz-Mat Team (HMRT-1)
• Technical Rescue Team (TRT-1), including trench, rope, confined space, collapse, machinery, and tower rescue modules
• Swift Water/Dive Rescue Team for inland lakes and retention ponds
• A Type III Incident Management Team that can deploy within or outside the division for large-scale events.

Training & standardization - Division 1 coordinates multi-agency drills on SCBA accountability, MAYDAY, RTF (Rescue Task Force), and Blue-Card/ICS. Member departments operate to a unified SOP set, ensuring plug-and-play interoperability with Divisions 2, 3, 4, 15, etc.

Statewide / EMAC gateway - Because Division 1 sits in the metro core, it often supplies initial strike teams for statewide deployments (e.g., southern Illinois tornadoes, downstate floods) and maintains logistics sites along I-90 and I-290 for Illinois Task Force 1 (IL-TF1) load-outs.

Cost-sharing benefits - Small and mid-size departments in Division 1 gain ready access to heavy rescue rigs, foam trailers, UAV/Drone units, rehab buses, and communications trucks—resources that would be cost-prohibitive to house individually.

Community value - Residents and businesses in Division 1 effectively receive “big-city” fire-rescue depth—multiple alarms, specialty teams, and disaster-response capability—without duplicated local taxes. The arrangement also speeds insurance-rating improvements (ISO / PPC) thanks to guaranteed back-up coverage.

Bottom line:
Division 1 is the high-density, specialty-team hub within the MABAS Illinois network. It leverages common procedures, joint dispatch, and pooled assets to give each member department—large or small—immediate access to the people, apparatus, and expertise needed for anything from a single-family house fire to a hazardous-materials release at a distribution megasite, while seamlessly connecting to the larger statewide mutual-aid system.