Case Study: Burns Lake achieves paperless, more productive fire inspections with CityReporter

Small town fire chief finds affordable alternative to paper heavy inspections

Burns Lake’s fire chief, Jim McBride, faced a paper-heavy, time-consuming inspection process—pre‑printed checklists, manual spreadsheet entry, printed letters and overflowing filing cabinets—that ate into his other duties. To tackle this, Burns Lake adopted CityReporter, a mobile inspection app (from Noratek Solutions) to digitize fire prevention inspections.

CityReporter was trialed, customized with checklists and supported by vendor training, then deployed on an iPad Mini so inspections can be saved as drafts, filed to the cloud and completed in the field. The CityReporter solution eliminated stacks of paperwork, removed manual data‑entry and printing steps, and materially reduced administrative workload—McBride reports far greater productivity and no more stuffed filing drawers.

Burns Lake

Jim McBride

Fire Chief and Director