Technorati Tags: public fire protection, residential fire sprinklers, sprinkler ordinance

Predictive ability for emergency service requests represents a great potential for a safer community and cost-savings. The ability to predict the everyday variety of crimes, fires, and emergency medical calls is within reach. After 9-11, the trend toward information analysis and intelligence in law enforcement accelerated rapidly. Business intelligence analysis software and geographic information system technology has found its way into policing, not just in large urban areas but in small towns as well. National databases and information sharing among all levels of law enforcement make it possible to reduce the risk of terrorism threats.

It also works for the crimes that a city such as Richmond, Virginia experiences routinely. An information management system for predictive crime analysis includes elements for data mining, reporting, and mapping with GIS software. Police officers receive the estimations or predictions for crime hot spots before their shift begins. The result is positive action taken to prevent crimes rather than a reaction to a crime already committed. Using the system, the city lowered its dangerous city rating in one year, dropping from fifth highest to number fifteen. The goal of these systems is to replicate the “intuitive nature” of a highly experienced police officer. Data collection is the key. Without baseline data, such systems have no predictive value also critical is a records management system that facilitates data mining.

While this approach has application for arson crimes, attempting the same for building fires is unfortunately more problematic. Some progress in this regard is underway as a team of Australian geographers works with the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service for the purpose of better allocating fire service resources and save lives. In the terminology of geographic analysis, the research team is investigating the spatial-temporal arrangement of urban fires and their association with weather conditions, calendar events, and socio-economic conditions. The area protected by this particular fire service has a large migrant population. The budgets of urban fire-rescue services are limited and thus essential that managers and planners understand the underlying forces that drive where, when and why fires start.

Using disaggregated fire incident data form Queensland Fire and Rescue Service subsequently aggregated to the Statistical Local Area, the team used the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ defined index of socio-economic disadvantage (SEIFA) as the basis to identify relationships between socio-economic disadvantage and building fires. They then used a regression model to develop predictions for the incidence of building fires over a range of socio-economic variables.

The geographers identified five significant predictors: percentage of unemployed, proportion of indigenous population, families living in separate dwellings, one parent, and parent families with children less than fifteen years of age. This study shows that mapping urban (building) fires for informed decision-making and resource allocation has potential for further application in other areas to validate the results.

Technorati Tags: crime analysis, crime mapping, GEOINT, GIS, NFPA 1710, NFPA 1720, Standard of Cover, strategic planning

There is a repository of historic fire insurance maps containing information that could be vital to your current work especially if you work in commercial real estate, development, urban planning, or insurance. I am referring to the collection of fire insurance maps retained by and offered through EDR as the Certified Sanborn® Map Report. This is a collection containing the original fire insurance maps of American cities and towns drafted by the field survey crews of the Sanborn Map Company. Crews mapped as many as 12,000 American cities and towns starting from the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They collected information critical to fire insurance underwriters. The fire underwriters needed to know information about the risk associated with the building in question, its’ use, nearby structures, occupancies of those structures, location of fire hydrants, and generally the surrounding area. They mapped areas at large scale to provide the rich details. They noted construction methods, type of building materials used, processes undertaken inside buildings, and storage. Because the Sanborn crews returned approximately every 10 years, the maps represent a long-term record of land usage. Today this information is useful to developers who want to know about hidden risks, land use planners seeking the history of a location and its’ previous uses, and environmental historians. EDR supplements the digital Sanborn map with a series of historic aerial images by decade, city directories, as well as USGS topographic maps. EDR certifies the package of maps and images as accurate to a set of standards so that the information is in a sense validated for any potential legal issues.

Technorati Tags: Sanborn Fire Map, urban planning

This article first appeared on the PolicyOne Research Blog on July 29, 2009

Forget the traditional road map for a minute, the road map we are referring to here is really a process of evaluation leading to strategic planning. It is an in-depth analysis of how the fire department deploys its resources. Why is that important? Well, consider the investment a community makes inproviding fire protection services. That investment is a cost like any other public service and should be subject to the same control and management applied to other municipal department budgets.

The cost of public fire protection in the US is significant and rising, as are the losses caused by fires. American communities, in part because of our national culture, have always assumed the burden of providing public fire protection. In most cases, public fire protection is simply the fire department. Unfortunately, from the national to the state to the local level, we pay only lip service to technical efficiencies such as automatic firesprinkler systems and fire codes that could help to reduce fire protection costs. Requiring the installation of automatic fire sprinkler systems reduces total loss in dollars due to fire and helps to save lives and by implication, automatic sprinkler systems could ultimately help to reduce the cost of public fire protection.

While sprinkler systems reduce fire losses, do not reduce the need for a fire department they simply allow for a smaller and more efficient one. Since we are not moving toward a universal mandate for sprinklers, we should instead seek efficiencies in how we manage and deploy fire services. Funded in the municipal budget, the local fire department competes for tax dollars as do the police, public works, and school system. To highlight efficiencies, police chiefs long ago recognized the value of agency accreditation to validate the management controls applied within their individual departments. Within the past few years, fire chiefs have begun to recognize the value of national accreditation.

The foundation of fire service accreditation rests upon the so-called standard of cover (or the SOC). The SOC is actually a creation of the British Fire Service. In Great Britain, the Home Office used the SOC to manage their collective fire services nationalized after WW II. It only took 50 years for this revolutionary concept to make its way across the big pond to America. Today, the best and most effective American fire departments have developed their own standard of cover to qualify and quantify the level of service provided.

By definition, the standard of cover consists of…those written procedures that determine the distribution and concentration of fixed and mobile resources of a fire agency within a given community. (Source: (http://publicsafetyexcellence.org) The SOC is applicable fulltime and volunteer fire departments, both large and small. At its core, the SOC defines the most appropriate levels of service for a community based on risk and available resources because no one size fits all. PolicyOne recently conducted a resource deployment study for the Fire Departmentof the City of Lewiston, Maine. A large part of that evaluation included a study of fire station locations using GIS software. PolicyOne provides basic and advanced analysis of municipal fire services. See what we have to offer by visiting our fire service webpage at: http://www.policyoneresearch.com/FireService.asp

Technorati Tags: Applied Geography, emergency planning, GIS, NFPA 1710, NFPA 1720, Standard of Cover