The San Gabriel Fire Department was unable to develop, maintain and access pre-incident plans that are useful or easily accessible to first due company captains. This significantly reduces the information that is available to that officer upon arrival at the scene of an incident. Lack of information increases the risk to fire personnel at the scene, as decisions made by first arriving officers are based solely on a visual assessment of the conditions observed from outside the location, rather than known information presented to the officer in the apparatus while en route to the incident. Using descriptive research methodology, this paper identified the key components of a pre-incident planning program that improves the basic and inconsistent system that has been sporadically used by the San Gabriel Fire Department for at least the last 15 years.Five research questions examined industry standards, problems end users experience using pre-incident plans, critical elements of a pre-incident plan, differing needs of company officers and incident commanders, and accessibility of critical information to the company officers en route to an incident. The research included a review of literature related to the subject, a questionnaire and interviews. The questionnaire was distributed to company officers and incident commanders across the United States, as well as to the officers of the San Gabriel Fire Department. Interviews of two San Gabriel Chief Officers, the Deputy Fire Marshall and a Fire Captain were conducted.The results of the research were compared to the literature reviewed, and a series of recommendations were developed to re-establish and enhance the pre-incident planning program, with an emphasis on the creation of useful, well maintained and easily retrievable data, that can be used to enhance the decision-making ability of first due company officers, therefore reducing the risk to firefighting personnel.