Fire department staffing has been significantly squeezed since the Great Recession, requiring a different approach as municipalities slowly climb out of the financial wreckage of 2008. Before the days of “Standards of Cover” and GIS-driven data, fire departments were considered Standing Armies. The earliest use of this description was in the City of Boston “Report and Evidence on the Reorganization of the Fire Department and the Cause of the Fire May 30th, 1873.” City Document No. 97, after a significant fire that started in a furniture factory.
The committee have used the words “standing army” intentionally, because no others so well express the nature of the organization to which the defence of a large city against fire should be entrusted.
The furniture factory blaze coming so soon after the November Great Boston Fire of 1872 resulted in a citizen-lead reorganization of command and deployment of the Fire Department of the City of Boston. The long and painfully slow municipal recovery from the 2008 recession forced many departments to go from a standing army to a thinly staffed task force that can barely handle the day-to-day workload.
Camden New Jersey using “Big Data”
In November Fire Station 7 was closed due to structural integrity issues and Engine 8 was relocated. Camden Fire Officers IAFF Local 2578 posted a notice on their FaceBook page about the closing of Station 7 and other coverage issues:
During this process, Camden Fire Administration has also removed Engine Eight from its home at Broadway and relocated them to cover an area of far less risk (based on incident response data) under the guise of “Engine Six.” Fire Administration took this action despite the fact that they were presented with facts that this would not serve the purpose of effectively mitigating an already dire situation since it would remove resources from areas that need it (*based on data/Engine Eight) and reallocate them to areas where incidents are less likely to occur. Fire Administration has also not ceased the dangerous practice of Closing Units (Brown Outs) of which Engine 8, Engine 9, Ladder 1, and now Engine 6 have been a part of.
The notice included this map: Structure Fire Probability Level and Risk Assessment: Map 7 depicts the probability level for structure fires by census block group. The highest probability levels of structure fires are located around the Fire Stations of Engine 1, Squad 7, Engine 8, and Engine 10. (Based on a GIS study of Risk Assessment & Response Capabilities Analysis of the Camden Fire Department – 2018)
The Fire-Community Assessment Response Evaluation System, known as FireCARES, is a “big data” analytical system providing important information to fire service and community leaders about their local fire department and the risk environment. FireCARES includes more than a decade of research on structure fires and related injuries and death, as well as building footprints, housing, and mobile home units, public health and census data, and vulnerable populations.
FireCARES combines large sets of data from various sources to “tell the story” of a fire department in regard to its risk environment, resource capacity, and overall capability to respond to emergency incidents.
The FireCARES project, funded by FEMA AFG, raises the bar for the technical discussion of community hazards and risks and the impact of changes to fire department resource levels. The data from FireCARES can be exported to a real-time reporting system, NFORS.
The National Fire Operations Reporting System (NFORS) project is funded through an Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program’s (AFG), Fire Prevention and Safety Grant (FP&S). The goal of the NFORS is to improve firefighter and civilian safety through consistent and quality data.
Local fire departments using the NFORS modules can assess the impact of their response availability, capability, and operational effectiveness on the “outcome” of a fire or other emergency. An optimal “outcome” minimizes the occurrence of firefighter injury and death, civilian injury and death, and property loss.
This real-time reporting will allow trying out “What if” deployment scenarios and the impact on fire risk, fire spread risk and death and injury risk.
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Featured picture “Report to Staging” 1992 Los Angeles County Health Department greater alarm high rise fire (250 firefighters/50 fire companies) from www.crownapparatus.com
The Saturday morning fire blaze swept through the seventh-floor offices of the health department’s emergency medical services agency and facilities management branch, a crowded maze of partitioned cubicles, workstations, desktop computers, and filing cabinets. Among the records destroyed were computer data on the county’s emergency trauma network. The 1971 highrise did not have fire sprinklers.