METHANE, by the Book
The first message of a major incident isn't a paragraph of prose. It's a METHANE report. We rebuilt pre-arrival and disaster notifications to follow the protocol exactly, field by field, the way the radio call actually comes in.
Real emergency services don’t hand off a major incident in free text. They run METHANE — a fixed, ordered protocol that every responder reads the same way. Our notifications now do the same.
The two messages that open an incident — Pre-incident standby and Disaster confirmed — render each field on its own, in order:
- M Major incident status, shown as a badge: Not declared until command declares it, then flipped to a red Declared.
- E Exact location, down to the kilometre marker.
- T Incident type.
- H Hazards, listed out when there’s more than one.
- A Access and egress.
- N Casualties, with color-coded Red / Yellow / Green / Deceased counts. Every value reads N/A on the standby message — early in a real incident, you don’t have the numbers yet — and resolves to hard counts once the scene is confirmed.
- E Emergency services required, as a checklist of who’s rolling.
The confirmed message also carries ETA as a badge in its header — the single number that decides how long you have to prepare the floor. Practising on a report that matches the real format means the muscle memory transfers when it counts.