Photo found on Wikimedia Commons courtesy of Keith4048.
By Bart van Leeuwen
After Sunday morning mass in Amsterdam, Holland, in the late 1970s, my parents would walk to my grandmother’s house for their regular coffee. I was about three years old, sitting in a buggy. While passing the fire station along the way, I would twist my back, trying not to miss a chance to see the fire trucks roll out. Every boy wants to be a firefighter, but there are times that we gradually think of another career. I chose mechanical engineering, although I eventually ended up in the information technology (IT) business anyway; it could have been that my father’s career at IBM as well as being exposed to computers since 1984 had something to do with that. I went on to found my own company and take a deep dive into this thing called “The Internet.”
Still, I could not stop thinking about those red fire trucks. In 1995, I graduated from the fire academy and received my basic firefighter diploma, and I became a proud volunteer in the town in which I lived. After moving and switching to another fire department, I decided to pursue a career position; the Amsterdam Fire Department was hiring! On September 10, 2001 (yes, the irony), I started at the academy. In early 2002, I got my first permanent station assignment: Bernard, Haarlemerplein, the oldest still operational fire station in the country (established circa 1879).
Although I had finished my probie period by then, I stiill was appointed as a mentor (although I considered all the guys at the station as my mentor); most of them had more years in the service than I had birthdays, but a guy named Cees got the “official” role. One of the first things he said was, “Bart, we never have a fire at normal people.” I had no clue what he was talking about! My experience in my volunteer positions was mainly car crashes, car fires, industry fires, and your occasional residential fire. All the people seemed rather normal to me.
It took me about six weeks to understand what Cees meant: Big city urban firefighting is about the unexpected; there is no “normal.” Over the years, I started to realize why I was considering that normal is actually NOT normal.
RELATED: Roden on The Scope of Technology ‖ Dittmar on Fire Technology for a Safer Tomorrow ‖ Ricci and Marcarelli on Using Technology to Survive
Fast forward to today. I’m writing this article in the same fire station my parents used to walk by every Sunday morning after mass. I’ve made it up the ranks to be a senior firefighter and station instructor, and I’m a prospective lieutenant waiting for a position to open up.
Most members of the fire service have a second occupation. And for me, being in the IT business has been a great combination with the fire service. I’ve always separated my company interests and fire service interests to where I find myself being asked by my business peers how to explain the concept of information sharing with a firefighter narrative. To me, explaining all the possible benefits of sharing information with a working fire as a background sounded like a fun thing to do. Little did I know what I was getting myself into with this presentation.
To make sure the presentation was a realistic as possible, I started to look into the fire service’s position of information gathering. I was shocked! One aspect of the fire service’s wealth of information that made me take notice was that it appeared that we may be going into places where we shouldn’t go. When I addressed my concerns at the fire department, I had a hard time getting the message through; by that time, most senior people in our command didn’t write their own e-mails, let alone understand a thing as “data on the web.” I had to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better explanation of where my problems lay; once I found out, the information started to resonate.
I thought, “I’m afraid that something will happen to either me or one of my colleagues, and in the end we will find out that all the information needed to prevent the accident from happening was known in our own organization or at our partners”
This resonated with even the non-e-mail-writing commanders, but how did I get to the point I where could articulate my fear?
Our society has become more and more reliant on digital information. Now, all of our basic, everyday transactions involve some form of digital information exchange such as credit card payments, weather report checks, outings on Facebook, and so on. And, this mass sharing of digital information has also transformed the way our government operates; all the information about our fire department’s work environment including maps, hydrant locations, lot ownership, and so on is most likely available in digital format.
Fifteen years ago, there was no feasible way of obtaining floor plans to buildings other than to send someone to an archive and pick up a paper copy. So, during incidents, you were aware of some gap of information, but you played the cards you got dealt. Now, not only are these floor plans available digitally, but so are data on construction materials, information on the hazardous behavior of modern insulation, electrical systems, registered businesses in the building and their hours of operation…I could go on and on.
My great fear is that there is so much data available, we will start to lose our insight. So, how much data is there? Current estimates suggest that every two years we collect twice the amount of data we had before. Let’s look at this abstract but exponential expression in hard numbers.
Consider that you start out your firefighting career with five books. Two years later, you’ll have 15 books [twice the amount you had collected before (10 books) + the five you already had], At that pace, you will have collected a staggering 71,744,535 books over a 30-year career; that is more than the Library of Congress! The chances of finding increased, better information about our environment are growing exponentially. As a result, my fear grows exponential as well.
If you create a chart out of the books equation, it will show that, after about 20 years, things start to get really out of hand. Haven’t we been collecting information on large scale for about 20 years now!? My fear of this data growth and its impact on our work is just beginning to show now.
What is causing this massive explosion of data? I would say it is sensors. These small, cheap, internet-connected sensors start spitting out data about anything they are designed to measure, and the amount of data they generate is almost beyond comprehension. For example, the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner airliner is stacked with sensors—it can now create more than one-half a terabyte of data per flight. You could fill 800 compact discs with that amount of data!
There has been a lot of fuss around this “big data” and the fire service. However, we are not even close to big data just yet. So, how does this Boeing Dreamliner and its data sensors relate to our work? This technology is literally invading our domestic work environment such as our thermostats, our security cams, smoke detectors, smart meters, solar panels, regulated refrigerators, and so on. And, most large commercial buildings feature sophisticated building control systems, which can determine temperature and humidity levels up to a three-foot accuracy. We are facing a world where the buildings on fire will actually be able to talk to us!
So, what do we use when fighting fires in those buildings? Static preplans with a five-year review cycle! We have to become smarter than even that, and we must embrace smart data to create smarter firefighters.
Bart van Leeuwen is a 21-year fire service veteran and a senior firefighter for the city of Amsterdam, Holland. For more than 20 years he has been the owner of Netage, a company that has given him a perspective on delivering operational information and that accommodates the ever-growing volume of available data and changes necessitated in tactical approaches to firefighting. He assists fire departments in resolving their information problems in a manner that views technology as an enabler, not the answer. Proven information management technology is combined with new paradigms, like semantic web technology, to deal with information flows in a smarter, agile way. You can contact van Leeuwen at bart@netage.nl or through Twitter at @semanticfire.
