Seven Habits of Highly Effective Fire Prevention Organizations

In 1824, Edinburgh, Scotland, was faced with a fire crisis. Major fires were occurring throughout the city, and the insurance company fire brigades were less than effective because they lacked discipline and failed to work together. The municipal leaders, not happy with the situation, set out to take control of their fire problem. In response, one of fire service history’s most influential and progressive-thinking officers—James Braidwood—was selected to become the first Master of Engines for the Edinburgh Fire-Engine Establishment.

In 1830, Braidwood wrote: “Not having been able to find any work on fire engines in the English language, I have been led to publish the following remarks, in the hope of inducing others to give further information on the subject.” These remarks led to his writing the 138-page book On the Construction of Fire Engines and Apparatus: The Training of Firemen, and the Method of Proceeding in Cases of Fire. Braidwood’s book covers much more than how to build a fire engine; it provided one of the earliest guides on “the causes of fires and the means of preventing them.”

Tasked with creating this fire organization, Braidwood required and requested 80 men. Facing the same challenges that many departments face today, and citing “budget constraints,” his request was reduced to 50 men. Like today, the fire service was being asked to do more with less as early as the 19th century.

Nowhere is this more evident than within fire prevention organizations. With limited personnel, fire prevention organizations are being forced to function more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Many fire departments have few dedicated fire prevention personnel covering many square feet of space, responsible for the task of life safety inspections, fire protection system testing, plan review, investigations, public education, and additional administrative tasks.

With the many tasks, responsibilities, and requirements of a fire prevention organization, how can we best use our personnel and ensure that they are functioning most effectively and efficiently by focusing on the right things?

In 2016, in response to requests to address staffing of fire prevention organizations, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) released the inaugural publication of NFPA 1730, Standard on Organization and Deployment of Fire Prevention Inspection and Code Enforcement, Plan Review, Investigation, and Public Education Operations, to provide guidance on how to establish and perform the essential functions and tasks of the fire prevention organization.

Based on historical context, current needs, best practices, published standards, and successful fire prevention programs, the following “seven habits” were recommended for the fire service to implement to ensure highly effective and efficient fire prevention operations and organizations:

1. Know the community.
2. Have a plan.
3. Enforce the code.
4. Be proactive with plan review and field inspections.
5. Investigate fire incidents.
6. Educate the public.
7. Ensure adequate staffing.

Know Your Community

Personnel must be out and about. They must walk through the community and its buildings. They must get involved in community groups, organizations, and clubs. They should talk to people and observe who is involved and what is going on. In addition, they must also analyze and know the following data about their community:

• Demographics. Know the age, gender, socio-economic background, and status of your community members and citizens.
• Geographic overview. Know the geographical layout of your community. Also, know who lives in what area and what businesses, processes, hazards, and challenges exist.
• Building stock. Know the different occupancy types within your community. Also know what happens in each of these different buildings, structures, or occupancies. Finally, understand the processes and hazards that they contain.
• Fire experience. Know your community’s history with fire. Track fire incidents and know trends as well as the most common or recurring fire incident types and locations.
• Responses. Know what the most common calls for service are.
• Hazards. Know what hazards exist in your community and the vulnerabilities they present.
• Economic stability. Know which activities, systems, processes, and structures are vital to the financial sustainability of your community. Also know which assets—if lost—would have the most detrimental financial impact and result in the most financial loss.

Gathering and analyzing this information are essential for creating a community risk assessment that will show trends, needs, and risk exposure and can forecast potential issues and incidents.

On knowing your community, Braidwood wrote: “… every exertion should be used to keep the firemen on good terms with the populace …. He should also make himself well acquainted with the different parts of the town in which he may be appointed to act, and notice the declivities of the different streets, etc. He will find this knowledge of great advantage.”

In examining his fire data from 1824-1829, Braidwood also wrote, “Serious fires decrease as the number of alarms increase … the cause of so many alarms … arise from foul chimneys … the number of houses, shops, and assessable places … is 29,000 … average of fires for … five years is about 105 … cases of foul chimneys … being one fire to each 276 houses.”

In other words, Braidwood knew in 1830 that knowing your community is essential for creating a fire prevention strategy.

Have a Plan

The fire service seems to have plans and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for everything. These SOPs provide standard operating directives such as fire preplans, incident action plans, organizational master plans, and strategic plans. However, there is often no fire prevention plan, or the plan is simply to keep doing “what we’ve always done,” what another department is doing, or what someone says we should do. Departments need clear, focused, and strategic fire prevention plans.

On the subject, Braidwood wrote, “The person having the principal charge … should frequently turn over in his mind what might be the best plan … by frequently ruminating on the subject, he will find himself … much more fit for his task than if he had never considered the matter at all.”

Your fire prevention plan comes from knowing the community and its risks, hazards, fire and incident history, response types, and call levels. From this data, you can create a risk-reduction plan that focuses on a community’s specific needs and seeks to eliminate or reduce those high-frequency events or incidents. This plan will show how much time and effort you should spend doing fire prevention tasks such as public education, investigation, inspections, systems maintenance, and plans reviews. Cut programs and processes that are not making an impact or have no real practical application, and focus those energies on more critical tasks.

Enforce the Code

Braidwood wrote, “As almost all fires arise from carelessness in one shape or another, it is of the utmost importance that every master of a family should persevere in rigidly enjoining, and enforcing on those under him, the necessity of observing the utmost possible care, in preventing such calamities, which, in nineteen cases out of twenty, are the result of remissness or inattention.”

Code enforcement is a key component in preventing fire and life safety incidents from occurring in existing structures. This can be a daunting task because it can be the most time consuming and require the largest commitment of personnel.

However, by breaking down this large process into smaller pieces, you can ensure that all occupancies are inspected at regular intervals. Based on a community’s building stock, you can determine which occupancies are at the greatest risk for fire, and an inspection schedule can be created to address these risks.

Assign each occupancy to a risk category of high, moderate, low, or critical. High-risk occupancies may be inspected annually, while moderate- to low-risk areas are inspected biannially or triannially. You may need to inspect critical facilities and infrastructure more frequently or multiple times per year.

High-risk occupancies may be buildings such as apartments and health care, detention, assembly, or educational facilities. Moderate-risk occupancies can be ambulatory health care, walk-in clinics, and industrial buildings. Storage, mercantile, business, and office buildings could be considered low-risk occupancies. Critical infrastructure facilities are buildings such as power plants, water treatment facilities, public safety buildings, and special structures unique to the community.

Be Proactive

The plan review process lets a builder or property owner understand the feasibility and expected costs of the project. It also provides a preview of what the fire department can expect to be coming to its community. The plan review process reveals site access, water supply, construction features, and fire protection systems availability. In this plan review phase, you can discover hazardous processes that take place within the structure or hazardous materials stored on site.

Compliance with construction codes and installation standards is ensured through the field inspection activity. These final field inspections allow systems to be tested for functionality and the structure and operational features to be inspected throughout the process, culminating in the building owner receiving his final Certificate of Occupancy to signify that compliance standards have been met and the building is safe for occupancy.

Braidwood made the following observations related to the building construction and field inspection process: “Great carelessness is frequently exhibited by builders, when erecting at one time two or three houses connected by mutual gables, by not carrying up the gables or party-walls with a skew on the outside, so as to divide the roofs …. It is not [an] uncommon thing, too, to find houses divided only by lath and standard partitions, without a single brick in them.

“The subject of fire-proof buildings might occupy a considerable space …. To make a building fire-proof, the stairs must be of stone, and the doors of iron … the next thing to be considered is a supply of water.”

Investigate Fire Incidents

Conducting origin-and-cause fire investigations provides a whole different set of data than you can gain through inspections or enforcement. Based on investigations, you can identify new hazards and track incident causes. The information and data gained from conducting fire investigations are useful for the following:

• Improving public awareness and education.
• Implementing more aggressive inspections.
• Providing input into firefighting tactics and operations.
• Modifying regulatory requirements for buildings and products.
• Preventing or mitigating similar occurrences.

Through the fire origin-and-cause investigation process, Braidwood determined and tracked the most frequent causes of fire. He wrote: “The most immense hazard is frequently incurred for the most trifling indulgences, and much property is annually destroyed, and valuable lives often lost, because a few thoughtless individuals cannot deny themselves the gratification of reading in bed with a candle beside them … leaving their houses to the care of children.”

Intoxication is also a disgraceful and frequent cause of fire … cinders falling between the joints of the outer and inner hearths … foul chimneys.”

Educate the Public

By identifying root fire causes and at-risk populations, you can set a public education agenda. Whether the population is senior citizens, young children, college students, or the workplace employees, there are many existing programs you can use to effectively educate and reduce risk. Behavior changes only with education.

Braidwood’s public education messages resemble many of today’s public education messages. On the subject, he wrote: “When a fire actually takes place, every one should endeavor to be as cool and collected as possible.

“The moment it is ascertained that fire has actually taken place, notice should be sent to the nearest station where there is a fire-engine … shut all the doors and windows as close as possible, which greatly retards the progress of the flames.”

Adequate Staffing

The final habit of highly effective fire prevention organizations is that they are adequately staffed. Without adequate personnel, the fire prevention organization is at risk of being either ineffective, inefficient, or both. NFPA 1730 provides the following five-step formula for determining minimum staffing levels:

Step 1: Outline all services provided by the fire prevention organization. This signifies the importance of knowing the community and having a plan. The plan lets you focus on providing the services that provide the most impact.

Step 2: Determine the time demand for each task. How long does it take to conduct an inspection, develop and present public education programs, or conduct a plan review?

Step 3. Determine the total personnel hours required to complete these activities. This is the total annual time required for all fire prevention activities.

Step 4. Calculate personnel total availability. How many hours per year are personnel available to conduct these fire prevention tasks? Subtract time for vacation, sick time, and mandatory training requirements.

Step 5. Calculate the total number of personnel required to perform tasks. Determine this by dividing the total task hours by the total work hours available. The final number is the total of full-time employees needed.

Braidwood would eventually leave Edinburgh for London, where he would become superintendent of the London Fire Engine Establishment. There he remained until, at the age of 62, the “Father of the British Fire Service.” Braidwood was eventually killed by a building collapse while fighting a large warehouse fire.

In recent years, standards such as NFPA 1730; NFPA 1452, Guide for Training Fire Service Personnel to Conduct Community Risk Reduction; and NFPA 1300, Standard on Community Risk Assessment and Community Risk Reduction Plan Development, were created to discuss and present the “new” concept of community risk reduction. James Braidwood’s story from 1830 demonstrates that the principles of fire prevention and effective fire prevention organizations have been around for a long time. Although the terminology may change and new buzzwords may come and go, these seven tenets for effective community fire prevention remain the same.

B. AARON JOHNSON has more than a decade of fire protection/life safety experience and is the fire marshal for the Rural/Metro Fire Department at Sikorsky Aircraft in south Florida. Johnson has multiple fire service certifications. He authored the book Sun Tzu and the Art of Fireground Leadership and runs the Web site www.TheCodeCoach.com.