Excellent compared to what?

In my post titled "What is excellence in fire protection?" I mentioned the need for valid measures to gauge fire department performance. I suggested two measures in a later post.

At present, very few fire departments are evaluating the results of their public fire protection systems. However, those few show that some fire chiefs understand the need to catch up to other public services on this issue.

But even if a large number of fire departments switched to results-based evaluation, the following question remains. How do we compare apples to apples? Fire Department A may have a lower effectiveness score than Fire Department B, but what if it jurisdiction has higher risks than those in Fire Department B's locale? Moving to results-based management is important, but it is only the first step in comparing fire department effectiveness.

In 2001, my friend Ronny Coleman helped develop a method for measuring what I call a community's fire risk exposure. The program is called RHAVE, an acronym for "Risk, Hazard and Value Evaluation." Fire departments can employ RHAVE to assess the risk level of each structure using a variety of measures such as the potential demand on firefighters and equipment, the number and type of occupants, etc. The results are assigned to a matrix of frequency and consequences.

RHAVE's goal is to give fire chiefs data which they can use to describe their community fire risk and justify budget levels. I do not know how many fire departments are using RHAVE, but I would prefer a more straight forward method that does not depend upon personal judgment.

Part of RHAVE's risk analysis places structures in one of the following categories: maximum, high, routine and remote. It is similar to a set of categories that I have previously developed. Whatever the number of categories, we need a universally accepted way to describe risk. Once we do, we can than categorize fire departments based upon their overall degree of risk exposure. The information will let us interpret fire department effectiveness scores in light of their risk exposure scores. Then we will be comparing apples to apples.