BY JOHN DOYLE
Here in Cleveland, in northeastern England, United Kingdom (UK), we have reduced dramatically the number of accidental dwelling fire deaths, serious fire injuries, and traffic fatalities on our roads in recent years. We achieved this by working in partnership with the people, businesses, and organizations in our local communities to tackle what we see as the root cause of our most serious fires—the underlying social deprivation in our operating area. This determination was made after reviewing detailed intelligence, which included socio-demographic, victim, and vulnerability profiling, gathered over the past six years by our intelligence analysts, who were trained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
After all, when you think about it, fire does discriminate simply because it takes the path of least resistance through any medium or building, and communities are no exception. Fire thrives in conditions of social deprivation to the point that it becomes a symptom of underlying causes rooted in antisocial behavior fueled by drink, drugs, unemployment, and lack of self-worth. It also preys on the vulnerable; certain lifestyle choices pose an increased risk from fire, and people in those situations are more likely to suffer its adverse effects.
At the outset, however, we weren’t prepared to deal with the wider social issues associated with improving the safety of our community and reducing the risk to life. As we attempted to identify and address the underlying social deprivation, we realized that we needed assistance from other agencies and partners that had the knowledge and capacity to help us resolve those issues.
THE RISK IN PERSPECTIVE
Cleveland is an area of considerable industrial decline accelerated by global competition. It has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country and the second highest indices of multiple deprivation (IMD) in the UK fire and rescue service operating areas.
Two of our wards are in the top 10 of the most socially deprived wards in the UK, and just under half of our wards are in the top 10 percent of the most socially deprived. Furthermore, up-to-date computerized incident analysis since 2003 shows our greatest life risk is in these socially deprived wards.
Cleveland has one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical plants in Europe and one of the highest volumes of road tanker traffic movements (11,000 a day) on the area’s roads. We have to provide cover for an international airport, Tees Port (the largest port by tonnage in the UK), and a nuclear power station. All of these facilities are very close to several dense population centers. The magnitude of the risk in Cleveland can be compared with that which existed when the UK’s biggest peacetime fire since World War II occurred at the Buncefield, Hemel Hempstead, fuel depot, 25 miles northwest of London. A fire in a petrochemical tanker farm caused major damage to housing, offices, and warehouses around the site. Local residents and staff from local businesses had to be evacuated. There were a large number of injuries and, remarkably, no deaths.
If the fire had occurred here in Cleveland, which is home to the equivalent of the Buncefield tanker farm, Phillips Conoco, there would have been many more casualties; it is highly probable that there may have been some deaths as well. Phillips processes 40 percent of the UK’s and one percent of the world’s petroleum. Its site is a hundred times bigger than the Buncefield site.
Prior to October 2006, Cleveland had an average accidental dwelling fire mortality rate of five to six persons per year, even with the considerable effort our brigade expended on fire prevention at the time.
In fact, a spate of seven fire deaths in our Asian community in 2001 led us to adopt a target of zero tolerance for fire deaths. Despite our best preventive efforts between 2002 and 2006, we could not reduce the number of deaths to fewer than three per year. We had not reached our target of zero tolerance. At that time, the goal appeared to be largely aspirational and unachievable.
THE BILLINGHAM SOUTH PILOT
In 2005, we began to lay down a strategic plan that would lower the number of our fatalities. It began with a pilot initiative in Billingham South, one of the most socially deprived district wards. The area had high crime levels for a range of offenses from house burglaries down to minor nuisance fires and general antisocial behavior. Local crime was a problem for the local residents, the police, and our fire brigade.
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| (1) Firefighters dug out rubbish in the neighborhood and worked with local council workers to have it removed. [Photos by Cleveland (UK) Fire Brigade.] |
Car crime in particular had a high economic and environmental impact. Local youths would steal motor vehicles, joyride in them, and then dump and burn them. In some cases, it was less than half an hour between the theft of the vehicle and its being reported to the fire brigade as a primary or F1 (the rating for our most serious fires) fire. In Cleveland, in 2004, the economic cost of this kind of offense alone amounted to just over approximately $9 million a year. Recovery of these vehicles was not only expensive but also involved several agencies—the local police, local councils, and the fire brigade. These offenses were putting pressure on scarce resources.
Cleveland’s strategic plan, endorsed by our senior management team, was to commit the resources of one local fire station, Billingham Fire Station, to do “Whatever It Takes” (WIT) to clean up the situation. The Billingham station had some support from our adjoining marine fire station, which was deployed into the Billingham South ward. The ward area, which comprises approximately 6,600 people and 2,735 households, had a high incidence of arson and deprivation. The firefighters deployed removed burnt-out, wrecked cars and all other dumped rubbish that could be used to start deliberate or nuisance fires.
The fire station crews regularly patrolled the area in their apparatus, performing a range of tasks from fitting free smoke alarms to helping the local authority to remove rubbish dumped on the street. They also took every opportunity they could to engage with local residents, especially young people.
The results of the six-month deployment were astonishing. First, the physical presence of firefighters on the streets with salvage hooks, digging out rubbish and working with local council workers to remove it, had a profound effect on local community relations. It even brought some local residents out to help. More profoundly, it opened doors in the community that we had not been able to get through before.
Previously, because of residents’ suspicion of uniformed authority figures, particularly the police, we had been able to enter only about 60 percent of the homes for fire safety visits to fit smoke detectors and help residents develop escape plans. When we increased the number of firefighters and the frequency of their visits, the residents’ mistrust and suspicion evaporated. Most schoolchildren in the area now know the names of the firefighters and refer to them on a first-name basis. This is partly the result of community-based activities such as a program in which qualified firefighters teach soccer skills to boys and girls.
Now that local residents saw the level of commitment and dedication of the local fire crews, and the police were not directly involved in what we were doing, the residents changed their attitude completely. We recorded a 478 percent increase in home fire safety visits. This ward now has one of the highest rates of homes with smoke detectors in our operating area, representing an 89 percent increase.
In addition, the Cleveland Police reported that the area had experienced the following benefits: a 59-percent reduction in deliberate vehicle fires, a 60-percent reduction in motor vehicle thefts, a 67-percent reduction in criminal damage to motor vehicles, a 33-percent reduction in house burglaries, a 25-percent reduction in criminal damage, and a 73-percent reduction in other crimes. Local residents reported feeling safer than they had for some years and remarked on the improvement in their environment and quality of life.
Our physical presence may have been a factor in deterring local youths from nuisance crimes, or the youth may have responded favorably to our presence and attempts to improve their local environment, but our efforts had produced some value-added crime reduction benefits for no additional effort on our part.
THE FULL-SCALE “WHATEVER IT TAKES” CAMPAIGN
The Billingham South pilot formed the basis for a larger campaign in 2006 to engage the wider community in partnership work. This project took us into other wards doing WIT to tackle the underlying deprivation in those areas. We made special high-visibility active resource deployments (ARDs) of fire brigade personnel and equipment into a defined geographical Fire Safety Zone. This became our highest priority campaign.
Protocols for partnership working developed in the Billingham South pilot were adapted for this larger WIT campaign. At the strategic level, the key to partnership working was to align our objectives of getting to the root cause of our most serious fires with our partners’ objectives of tackling the underlying deprivation. Ultimately, of course, we were all targeting the same underlying deprivation and the same target audience.
At the tactical level, we aligned and focused our partners and our operational activity through our ARDs. They involved allocating physical fire brigade resources to the affected area. An ARD could be anything from just a single fire apparatus and crew to several crews and community safety teams together with partnership resources deployed to do particular community tasks. The size of the ARD depended on the needs of the task.
Essentially, the ARDs created an operational bridgehead into the deprived wards. The bridgehead approach attracted the attention of our partners and drew in additional resources to help tackle the deprivation. The full range of brigade resources had been used at some point in the WIT area, which was comprised of our four most socially deprived wards in central Middlesbrough.
Working with the community in the WIT area takes into account the work of existing partnerships; we work through our local authority partners. Our operating area consists of four UK local authority areas; the central government has asked each area to reduce deprivation and narrow the gap between the well-off and the poor. Each authority operates through a Local Strategic Partnership by way of a local area agreement (LAA), which coordinates partnership activity in its borough areas.
We’ve carefully aligned our work in the community with the main LAA priority areas to ensure that we’re working synergistically and not antagonistically. For example, in the “Health and Well-Being” priority area, we saved the Middlesbrough Primary Care Health Trust approximately $490,000 with simple “Slips, Trips, and Falls” advice on preventing accidents in the home during home fire safety visits. We also give Heartstart UK courses to the general public, teaching them life-saving skills (basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation training). In “Environment” priority areas, we improved the local environment by doing street cleanups with Local Authority partners, using high-pressure hoses to remove debris and graffiti from the streets.
We’ve also been careful to cultivate the correct perception of our physical presence. We did not want to appear to be “gung ho” or taking an overly heavy leadership role; we performed as facilitators to the existing partnership activity. In essence, we have become the “Go To” service the public trusts unequivocally; they approach us whenever they need something other agencies or bodies have failed to deliver.
THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
The WIT has been developed into a partnership with four other fire and rescue services throughout the UK. The most serious fires in each operating area come from pockets of social deprivation similar to those in Cleveland.
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| (2, 3) Abandoned buildings and debris and graffiti were common in the socially deprived wards. |
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Each fire and rescue service has adapted the program to its own set of circumstances, and the delivery of the campaign differs according to the factors and circumstances in each brigade area. Without question, the concept of the program is well embedded. Although in some brigades it no longer operates in the precise council wards in which it was first launched, it is still used in other parts of their operating areas.
Some of the common issues participating brigades faced while implementing the program include the following:
- Difficulties in getting other local agencies to commit to a partnership. Some partners did not commit to the goals identified at the beginning of the campaign.
- It was difficult to maintain the interest and commitment that existed initially as the campaign progressed.
- In one brigade area, residents were concerned about the brigade’s appearing to be too closely allied with local law enforcement, especially in areas where the police were taking a heavy-handed approach to gang dispersals.
- Initially, some internal staff members did not understand the significance of the campaign and did not want to become involved in the wider social issues. However, even some of the cynics among the older hands, who now are the greatest advocates, became converts when they began working on the community safety teams.
- At the beginning of the campaign, some brigades did not engage the local community, Others, however, consulted with the community to obtain a mandate for the work to be done.
- There was a mix of internal and external information coming from partners. Some brigades have excellent internal systems for identifying the hot spot areas and looking in some detail at the possible causes—for example, geographical intelligence systems and lifestyle databases can be used to identify the lifestyles of the people within the problem ward areas. The information coming from the partner organizations was limited in some areas.
- Increased reporting of antisocial behavior put pressure on other organizations because it inflated their antisocial behavior statistics. However, the reporting was generally accepted as being necessary to successfully address community concerns.
The campaign is now embedded and accepted as a common thread running through mainstream community safety operations. It could also be adapted and altered to fit in with the longer-term objectives of each brigade. Providing timely statistics should be one of the mutually agreed on objectives of the campaign partners.
WHAT WORKED WELL
A number of initiatives appeared to work well in the brigades. The details are discussed in regular joint strategy meetings, which are underway, to evaluate the outcomes. Some of these initiatives follow.
WIT RESULTS IN CLEVELAND
In the first 20 months of the campaign, there were no accidental dwelling fire deaths in the program area; accidental dwelling fire injuries are down 27 percent. There have been no fatalities from road traffic collisions, and deliberate vehicle fires are down by 50 percent. Total primary fires were also down 7.7 percent, and total deliberate fires (excluding vehicle fires) were down 8.8 percent. We also recorded a 65-percent reduction in total incidents from one problem estate where the “Play with Football not with Fire” theme considerably reduced antisocial behavior.
One area we’ve been proactive in is in improving our fit with the community. Following the deaths of seven of the Black and minority ethnic (BME) populations in our Asian community in 2001, we built contacts with groups already working with these ethnic communities and employed two bilingual BME fire safety advocates, who were vital for overcoming language barriers in some of our most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach groups.
Their appointment coincided with the influx of asylum seekers and refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. They worked directly with individuals and community groups in those wards and developed important partnership links with key local and national organizations and agencies who work with these groups. The advocates worked with local colleges to deliver fire safety advice in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes and supported operational staff in improving the engagement of minority groups.
The importance of these efforts were evident during our London Bombings in 2005, where we deployed fire apparatus close to mosques and BME community centers to deter retaliatory hate crime attacks up here in the north of England. We were able to reassure our local BME community at a time of heightened tension. The consultation and feedback from local Muslim community elders was so positive and so much appreciated by the local Asian community that we repeated it during further bombing attempts two weeks later. Although the procedure was originated prior to the WIT launch, it was recently invoked following the attack on Glasgow Airport in the WIT area.
At Ramadan at the end of 2007, we worked with the local Radio Ramazan community radio station in the WIT area to generate more than 100 home fire safety visits in our BME community in just two weeks. These home fire safety visits are especially important because it is difficult to get access to Asian family homes at the best of times. This radio promotion helped to break down these people’s fear of uniformed authority figures and resulted in 100 very valuable home fire safety visits.
We also put on a wholly BME Life Intervention Fire Education (LIFE) youth course for Asian teenagers from the WIT area to help reduce antisocial behavior. We have also contributed to the Asian community’s health and well-being by training and empowering community members to deliver Heartstart UK training within their own community and raise their awareness of coronary heart disease with the local Primary Care Trust health authorities. Also, we employed special fire safety advocates in this community in the areas of older persons, younger persons, drug misuse, hearing and sight impaired, and the disabled. The advocates work directly with individuals, community groups, and key partner organizations. Their work has been invaluable in minimizing our life risk by reducing antisocial behavior and dealing with vulnerability. They recently ran a specially adapted adult LIFE course for offenders with the probation service, which has proved popular and helped improve the employment prospects of ex-offenders.
When operational resources and community safety teams were committed through ARDs in the WIT area in October 2006, the advocates’ activity was refocused in the WIT area. We have achieved an even deeper relationship with these vulnerable groups by connecting the advocates and community safety teams (operational staff deployed from stations from lower-priority and lower-risk areas) with the Fire Support Network volunteers from the affected communities. These volunteers come from the very communities and vulnerable groups being targeted in the WIT area. We have brought people from the affected communities into the fire brigade to work alongside us to contribute directly back to their communities.
For 19 months, across the entire brigade area, we have achieved our most important objective of zero tolerance for fire deaths, in contrast with the average of just over four to five accidental dwelling fire deaths in previous years.
When you consider that our original objective of zero fire deaths was largely an aspirational target and thought to be unobtainable by the majority of the workforce, having achieved 19 months, and now passing 36 months, with only one accidental fire death, the objective is close to becoming a reality. It is a remarkable achievement and a vindication of our approach to creating a safer community by targeting our highest risk in our most deprived communities through WIT.
Without doubt, this focus has had many other positive side effects. We have had a positive influence in molding societal behavior, which has led to improved respect for us and our reputation. It has bred a preventative mentality in the community with even greater engagement and public trust, and it has also greatly improved firefighter safety.
JOHN DOYLE, a member of the fire service since 1974, has been chief of the Cleveland (UK) Fire Brigade since 1997. He previously served in Moss Side, Manchester, and Kent. He has been an active member of the Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA) since 1992 and is the past chairman of its National Road Safety Group. For 10 years, after the deaths of two firefighters in a bonded warehouse fire, he was involved in developing and implementing the national Individual Personal Development System (IPDS) to improve firefighter safety. He has a master of philosophy degree from Bradford University.
