Back in the day, I participated in the development of what became the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. Among the many issues discussed was the feasibility of ranking fire departments. I sided with the proponents, but those in opposition prevailed. They argued that fire chiefs would see being a "Class C" fire department instead of an A or even B as some sort of putdown.
Looking back on it, such an evaluation would have been daunting, so it was probably good that we did not implement the idea. Today, however, we have better tools to do such comparisons, and I think that it is time to create a uniform method for ranking fire departments.
Specifically, I am talking about ranking fire departments based upon their fire risk exposure. I envision jurisdictions using a risk exposure scale to tally their structural fire risks and the demands they place on firefighters and equipment. Fire departments with relatively high risk exposures would be ranked above those with relatively little.
GIS mapping can make the evaluation relatively easy, and I'll be talking with some GSI folks about this when I attend Fire Rescue International in Dallas later this month. The ability to graphically depict various risk exposures and their locations would be a valuable tool for fire chiefs during budget sessions as well as ranking them with similar fire departments. Incidentally, if you are attending FRI and want to say Hi, I'll be staffing the International Code Council booth.
Supporters of RHAVE might say that the tool already accomplishes what I am suggesting. I see RHAVE as doing a lot of things instead of having a single purpose. In other words, RHAVE is a multipurpose tool, and I think that a tool designed specifically for the job will work better.
Here is why I see the value in ranking fire departments. Going back to a baseball analogy that I used in an earlier post, scoring fire department effectiveness is like giving baseball players effectiveness scores. Pitchers' ERA's are valuable when comparing pitchers. Batting averages help us compare hitters. However, such data is only useful when comparing teams that play at the same level. For example, the ERA's of pitchers on National and American League teams aren't very helpful tools for comparing them with pitchers on farm teams. That is because the big league pitchers face higher quality batters than their farm team counterparts, so comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges.
Perhaps the day will come when the US has a uniform, "apples-to-apples," method of ranking fire departments by the degree of structural fire risk they handle.
