STATISTICS—A SOUND MANAGEMENT BASE
MANAGEMENT
Saving lives and property from the ravages of fire is the first and foremost duty of fire companies everywhere. Good training programs, up-to-date equipment, sound strategies, tactics, and procedures all work together to make this responsibility a reality.
However, there is another, often crucial and often neglected element that can help preserve life and property by justifying funding for equipment, personnel, and training. It’s statistics. Properly gathered and used, statistics can also serve to lessen local fire losses by offering a sound basis for wellcalculated decisions on how to best utilize and channel fire department resources.
To begin, you must decide what statistics are wanted. For example, statistics on structural fires should basically cover:
Fire cause;
- Time of day/year that the incident occurred;
- Type/occupancy of the building;
- Location of the building within the community;
- Fire prevention code status;
- Number of deaths/injuries to civilians and firefighters;
- Property loss/damage;
- Socio-economic profile of civilian victims and/or occupants;
- Fire department investigation reports.
By analyzing these statistics, a clearer picture of the district’s specific fire trends should emerge, giving fire officials a better grasp of the scope of the fire problem and enabling them to better target limited resources in the prevention and suppression areas.
When determining resource allotment for fire suppression specifically, your department should also have data on the various types of fires experienced in your area and what equipment and manpower were needed to mitigate them. It is imperative to know the location of your district’s target hazards, the basic operations necessary to control the various incidents, and the location and availability of resources to carry out these tactics. Once this data is in place, regular updating of the statistics can be an ongoing, periodic process.
Having facts and figures on a community’s fire problems, existing property classifications, and the primary causes of firefighter injuries can be critical when requesting additional funds for new or replacement equipment. In addition, statistics can point to the level of fire loss resulting from limited resources.
In the area of fire prevention, a knowledge of the actual causes of fire within a particular geographical area coupled with profiles of both the victims and the starters of fire can be invaluable. This data can help administrators shape their fire prevention programs to the specific groups most in need of fire safety education as well as to those in need of corrective action.
Statistics can also serve to alleviate escalating service costs by presenting data on the amount of investment, personnel, and equipment that the municipality can afford, and what costs, if any, can be transferred to the private sector. Once the fire service administrator provides this data, the specific decisionmaking can be left to the elected officials.
After determining what statistics you want gathered, you must decide how to collect them. This is done typically by inside or easily accessible outside sources. Inside data sources may include:
- Fire and investigation reports
- Inspection records/reports
- Pre-fire planning
- Specific internal studies.
- Outside data sources may include:
- Property tax records
- Statewide fire loss records
- Loss records of local, surrounding fire departments
- Available statistics from the National Fire Protection Association.
The importance of having a sound statistical base to back up proposals and/or requisitions made to the municipal government cannot be emphasized enough. Statistics can be a key element in providing substantial background information on the nature and extent of a community’s fire problem as well as providing justification for expenditures and specific courses of action.
A good fire service administrator will ensure that the statistics collected are analyzed and interpreted and that the key points are appropriately displayed to all involved. The administrator should be sure that those involved in the data collection are properly motivated, otherwise quality suffers. These individuals must be told what is desired; the purpose of what is being done and what the data is to be used for; and, upon completion, they should be shown the final product. Additionally, all personnel who actually are responsible for the collection and/or analysis of statistics should be properly trained in how to collect data, including the definitions and guidelines used. Once this matter has been handled, quality control procedures for the department’s statistics should be set up. Quality control may be as simple as a supervisory review, or as extensive as a community-wide examination of all statistics.
An administrator should also ensure that personnel involved in statistical data verify its truth.
There are many pitfalls that can and will destroy valid statistics. A cardinal sin of the fire service is spending time and energy gathering statistics only to misuse them.
Statistics are often biased by a fire officer’s misuse of the definition of a particular term. Dollar loss in fires is often misreported, significantly influencing statistics.
In these situations, it is possible to adjust statistics for bias when the bias can be estimated qualitatively.
Another misuse of fire statistics is caused by the inclusion of “unknowns” on reports and records. To make data more understandable and manageable, it is often necessary to put detailed data into more general categories—and possibly alter the true statistical fire picture. For example, the term “residential” can include hotels, apartments, and single-family occupancies. Thus, the untrained analyst may think it’s hotels rather than single-family homes that have a high fire life loss record.
The most obvious suggestion for improving any statistical analysis is by processing all data through a computer. By having a computer, most fire departments can keep a core of data/statistics that is compatible with the format and coding used by both state and national fire statistical systems. This will permit even the smallest department access to national statistics, against which they can compare their own fire statistics and take corrective action. Maybe with all local fire departments working to lower their individual fire losses, the national fire loss record will begin to cease its continuous climb.
