Excellence in Fire Protection

Fire prevention and the Green movement

It is refreshing to see reports from fire service leaders who see fire sprinklers as a valuable part of the Green movement. Going "Green" means much more than improving energy efficiency. It means building sustainable buildings. Fire sprinklers play a vital role in extending the life cycle of structures, along with greatly reducing fire deaths and injuries.

I believe that fire sprinklers also contribute to "community" sustainability, and that "Green" supporters must include community sustainability as a big part of their cause. Fire sprinklers improve community sustainability because they can lower the cost of public fire protection. The less money needed for public fire protection, the more money available for making communities more viable.

The other elements of fire prevention - namely code enforcement and fire safety education - also help make communities sustainable. Effective codes, when coupled with quality plan review and inspections, can be a huge factor in reducing property loss, life loss and firefighter deaths and injuries. The same applies to fire safety education programs designed to address increased fire risks. Aging populations and ethnic cooking practices are just two of such risk categories where targeted fire safety education can play a key role to improve community sustainability.

Manual fire suppression will always be necessary. But when compared to built-in suppression and fire prevention, it is expensive and has definite limits in improving sustainability. Focusing on manual suppression at the expense of prevention can actually harm sustainability.

I think that my motto for advocating built-in fire suppression and fire prevention as part of the Green movement says it all. The goal of the Green movement should be "Safe buildings in sustainable environments."

A better way to justify FD staffing

The continuing trend of firefighter layoffs reveals more than the dire economic straits of cities and towns. It also shows a giant disconnect between policy makers and fire chiefs over what constitutes adequate fire protection.

The issue is by no means new. It is just that the economic downturn which began in 2008 has brought it front and center. Fire chiefs in general have never been able to make a good case for staffing and equipment levels. I have written and spoken about the need for a credible method of measuring fire department outputs and outcomes, but have seen little progress toward achieving that goal.

That is why a recent telephone conference call buoyed my spirits and told me that we are making progress. The participants were fire service leaders working on valid ways to measure fire department output and results, along with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) experts who are helping them construct the measuring tools.

The purpose of the call was to discuss a scale of structural fire risk exposure where the level of risk is defined by the number of firefighters needed on the initial response to a report of a working fire. It is based on what I call a "boots on the ground" approach to justifying fire department staffing levels, and it asks the following question. "For any particular type of structure, how many firefighters are required to perform the critical fireground tasks needed to handle an incident in that type of occupancy? A critical task is a task that must be performed simultaneously, or in close coordination, with other tasks and with a reasonable level of safety to the firefighters performing those tasks. Fire attack, ventilation and water supply are three such tasks. My post titled "How many firefighters does it take to stop a fire" discusses the concept of critical fireground task, so I won't go into it here.

There are two points to this. The first is that basing staffing levels on the number of critical fireground tasks needed for different structural fire risks is a valid way to justify staffing and equipment. The other point is that the number of firefighters needed must arrive at a fire scene in short order, and that dictates their locations throughout a jurisdiction.

The group on the conference call is working on such a scale. They will consider a pilot study to assign a risk level to every structure in a jurisdiction and then map the distance of each structure from the required number of firefighters.

With that data in hand, fire chiefs could see how well – or poorly – their manual suppression forces are staffed and equipped to handle the range of structural fire risks to which they are exposed. The knowledge will help them to prioritize those resources. Also, the data can point to priorities for using alternate methods of mitigating certain risks, like built-in suppression, inspection priorities and targeted public education. And of course, fire chiefs will be better equipped to describe their community's fire risk to policy makers in more meaningful terms.