FIRE LOSS MANAGEMENT
FIRE PROTECTION
Part 16: MANAGEMENT
Parts one through 15 in this series covered the first two wheels of the fire loss management “slot machine,” cause and extension (see Fire Engineering, April 1989, page 48). The third wheel is management, of which there are two distinct areas: the people or agencies that have control of some part of the problem, and the factors involved in the management of a potential or actual fire.
The “people and agencies” include everybody who has a share of the responsibility —the owner, the designer, the builder, the occupant, the manager, the insurer, volunteer organizations, and the government on the local, state, and federal level. It would be ideal if the problem were divided and each portion assigned to a management agency to avoid overlap and uncovered areas. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
There are glaring gaps in the protective system. Since the 1942 Coconut Grove nightclub disaster in Boston, many places of assembly post signs from the building department stating the legal occupancy and the capacity of the exits. Likewise the Coast Guard regulates how many people can be on a ship when it is at sea. The exits of a ship moored at a pier are not equivalent in the least to those required for a building. But despite this fact, there is no limit to the number of people allowed on board. (When a ship is tied up permanently at a pier to be used as a hotel or restaurant, the building department may require special exit provisions.)
While on the subject of fire protection on ships, it’s worth noting a fire that occurred aboard the S.S. Noronic at a Toronto, Canada pier, killing 118 people. Reports exposed the complete failure of the ship’s complement to control the fire and evacuate the passengers and pointed to the dangerous nature of the ship’s interior construction. Unexplained exceptions to the Canada Shipping Act of 1944 indicate the need for a requirement stipulating that all exceptions granted by “the authority having jurisdiction” be adequately documented. Do not dismiss this disaster because it occurred more than 40 years ago. Read the recent National Transportation Safety Board safety study Passenger Vessels Operating from US. Ports, NTSB/SS-89/01. The lack of adequate training, the difficulty of communication when a ship’s personnel do not speak a common language, and other serious problems cited should make a person think twice before embarking on a “fun-filled” cruise.
There are also many overlaps in the protective system. For example, a warehouse may be designed with a sprinkler system that meets the local code, but when the owner seeks a sprinkler rate for his insurance he may be told that the system does not meet the requirements of the insurers.
DEALING WITH AGENCIES
Most of our readers are in public fire protection. However, they should not view the following lightly. Public fire protection personnel should stay aware of conditions as they exist outside their own world if for no other reason than to widen their postretirement opportunities. An increasing number of readers are responsible for fire protection of a specific plant, an institution, or an entire complex. In most cases there is a sincere intent on management’s part to institute sound fire protection policies and hire a competent fire protection expert; however, in a few cases the objective is to employ a person who can find loopholes in regulations or who, because of previous associations, can persuade officials to “go easy.”
There are a number of readers who are concerned with the fire protection of government property. Government agencies generally are not subject to any outside influences. The federal government resists any inspections by local authorities on constitutional grounds. State agencies often exempt themselves from local control. Some manage to obtain statutory approval of exemption from local control. In Florida, for example, public schools have a statutory exemption from fire department inspections. Instead, each school system conducts its own inspections.
Many executives of federal agencies are confused about insurance. They have heard that the U.S. government is a self-insurer. This is not true. A self-insurer sets up what amounts to an insurance company in-house, and funds are available to pay losses. The U.S. government is a noninsurer. Each agency has a modest appropriation to cover small losses, but major losses must be funded through the appropriations process. When Atomic Energy Commission scientists finally understood that if a project burned —as did the Cambridge Electron Accelerator—there might be no funds to replace it, the degree of cooperation with fire protection staff increased markedly.
In the case of government agencies, the loss of capability to carry out the assigned mission may be much more significant than the dollar loss, though government dollar loss can be staggering. The admitted loss from a metal-deck roof fire at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma was S195 million. The fire at TVA’s Brown’s Ferry Reactor burned S50,000 worth of wire. For a year and a half the taxpayers paid at least S 150,000 a day extra to purchase coal power to replace the lost nuclear power.
The need to back up computer data is now’ commonly known. It was not always so. A number of years ago, the entire data of the Coast Guard AMVER System, which tracks thousands of ships in the ocean in order to summon the closest ships in an emergency, was stored in one computer in a room lined with combustible tile in the New York Customs House. A fire would cause the loss of data laboriously gathered over the years. I urged personnel to print out and store away from the building all the data at least once a month.
(Photos by author.)
The fact that the plant, equipment, and contents are all owned by the one government department and managed by a single manager charged with protecting the property does not make the fire protection specialist’s job any easier. There is a myth outside of government circles that fire protection in the government presents no real challenge because it’s just the taxpayers’ money. Those who have spent any time justifying fire protection within the government, where the dollar value of an intangible such as protecting a building cannot be demonstrated as it can be in industry, know that quite the reverse is true and that it is often harder to achieve an adequate level of fire protection within the government than in private industry.
Even in an organization where all agree that safety must be achieved
* there may be conflicts. Conflicts of interests, conflicts of personality, conflicts of program importance, prejudices, ignorance, and misinformation are brought to the job by those who make judgments.
Probably one of the chief difficulties of the fire protection field is that it is full of amateur practitioners—those ⅜who spent a few months as a volunteer firefighter or who had some sort of fire duty experience in the military
* service or who had a class or two in the operation of fire extinguishers. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the few * fields in which it is extremely difficult to find somebody who does not qualify himself to render judgments despite the fact that he has had no formal training or experience. When some Japanese historian writes the definitive story of the economic decline of the United States, a chief cause might be the acceptance of the idea that there is a “management science” and that the study of this “science” qualifies a person without any technical knowledge to manage an operation.
When Montgomery College placed all of its records on its new computer in the former library, I pointed out several apparently serious fire problems and offered to find expert assistance for the manager. He replied, “The fire marshal OK’d it.” He did not realize that the fire marshal’s interest was to see to it that all occupants got out alive. It is not part of the fire marshal’s duties or authority to worry about whether Montgomery College loses its records.
There are many ways in which the fire protection specialist can provide concrete, measurable data and thereby improve his argument for enhanced fire protection safeguards. One term developed in the AEC that could be grasped by “professional managers” was “dollar density,” which is the value in a given area in terms of dollars per square foot.
Program importance is another measure, especially for the city manager of a small town whose existence depends on one plant. The survival of that plant may be of more interest to the town than to the company, which might consider it marginal.
Another measure is “dollars per minute.” If there is a situation in which, for instance, a million dollars worth of damage can be done in the first minute of the fire, standard fire suppression techniques will not be much help. When the public fire official brings these considerations to private management, he may be shrugged off, laughed at, or regarded with new respect.
DEALING WITH MANAGEMENT
There are ascending echelons of command and various factions within management, each with its own agenda. In many cases prejudices, supersti^ tions, or erroneous ideas are so solidly implanted that your point of view is not heard. My own experience is that many managers dismiss “fire prevention” as something you learn about in -the fifth grade along with taking a trip . to the firehouse. Years ago I dropped the term “fire prevention” in favor of “fire loss management.” You must identify these trouble areas and try to overcome them tactfully (I repeat, tactfully—nobody wants their igno-^ ranee assaulted directly).
Education is only part of the job. After you educate people, you must motivate them. For example, you could stage a demonstration involving automatic sprinkler systems on actual fires to show the results-oriented manager who worries about the costeffectiveness factor just how impor-, tant fire safety and fire protection are.
Some fire protection specialists get disgusted, saying, “They made me prove how much I knew about this subject before they hired me. They hired me because I’m an expert, but now when I give advice they ignore it. Why?” Well, for one reason, people ,, rationalize, “We have hired an expert to take care of the problem; therefore, the problem is taken care of.”
Fire protection is just one of a manager’s many concerns. Maybe he is torn between spending money on fire protection and spending it on raises to retain key personnel. Maybe you caught the manager at a bad time * when you approached him with fire protection concerns. Fire protection reaps long-term, intangible benefits. The pressure is on management for short-term profits that improve the bottom line and thus improve the ⅞ stock price.
Despite the fact that you may think of yourself as a technical adviser, you are in fact a salesman. You have a product to sell and you can’t sell everything to a client every day. De-cide what needs selling the most, decide where you can do the manager i the most good based on your intimate knowledge of the subject, and work toward that objective.*
