EFFINGHAM FIRE DEPARTMENT - MUTUAL AID
The department maintains mutual aid agreements with over 1,300 departments in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Missouri through the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System (MABAS). Our area is known as MABAS Division 54 and includes departments in Effingham, Jasper, Fayette, Cumberland, Shelby, and Richland Counties in Southern Illinois.
There are two types of mutual aid assistance the department utilizes, one is automatic mutual aid and the other is the box alarm system. While they may sound familiar, they each have a benefit to enhance our services.
Automatic mutual aid response is a pre-arranged response agreement to provide or receive immediate response to a predetermined type of incident and or location from another department. This provides the affected department with additional resources to mitigate an incident, such as a working fire, in the early stages. By doing this, the damage is generally lower and the injuries to civilians and firefighters are reduced.
The other form of mutual aid assistance is the box alarm system, known as MABAS. This system consists of over 1,300 departments in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Missouri and provides assistance to each other in the event of an emergency that is beyond the normal capabilities of a community and its surrounding neighbors through a single contractual agreement. Pre-determined “box cards” outline what specific equipment is to respond to a specific type of incident. This brings endless resources and manpower to a stricken department in an orderly and structured fashion. Specialized operations such as hazardous materials and decontamination teams, technical rescue teams, dive rescue teams, search and recovery teams, fire investigation teams, mass casualty incident teams, rehabilitation teams, and stress debriefing teams are just a few of the resources available under the MABAS group.