Cities in Crisis

Many metropolitan cities are undergoing a life safety crisis right now. This is particularly true in those cities where reactive versus proactive fire protection, poor housing stock and declining socioeconomic conditions have forced them out of their previously held positions as the economic drivers of their regions. With this in mind, I would like to offer strategies to help prevent such cities from reaching a life safety crisis point as well as tips for managing an existing crisis situation. 

Common factors

Many of these cities facing a life safety crisis can be found in New England, the Mid-Atlantic region and Midwest. They often have a working population in which the majority of workers had stable careers in blue collar industry. But as global economic conditions changed, so have the cities’ fortunes.

As job options diminish, workers leave these cities in search of better opportunities. For those who remain, it is often the poorer residents who find themselves needing to heat their homes however they can—with space heaters, badly maintained fireplaces, furnaces and candles. These unsafe practices in housing already degraded by age and heavy use are often the cause of serious, sometimes fatal, fires.

And when people die in fires, there is often backlash at the city, property owners and the fire department. The lack of a coordinated response to citizen concerns will naturally compound the problem.

Fire departments that serve cities facing these problems are varied in nature, but one thing many have in common is an understaffed fire prevention division and lack of life safety educators. These departments may hold life safety events, like those to identify fire hazards in homes and to install smoke alarms where needed; however, these activities don’t mean they are reaching the right members of the community or that the message is resonating.

Further, cities often find themselves wanting to attract back citizens who left—but they lack a coherent plan for how to do so or how to show an increasing quality of life. I believe the fire department has an important part to play in determining quality of life issues over the long term for these cities.

Risk assessment

However we choose to describe these places—the “Rust Belt,” “post-industrial” or the catchall “cities in decline”—their fire departments must take an important first step in changing their current course: Perform a comprehensive risk assessment of their own local conditions. Without knowing what the community’s risks truly are, the next step in the process—developing a strategic plan—is useless, or only exists for political expediency.

Some good news: Fire departments will soon have a valuable tool to help them find and coordinate risk information: NFPA 1300: Standard on Community Risk Assessment and Community Risk Reduction is scheduled for publication in 2019. In its current form, the standard suggests that the fire department form a picture of its community by compiling information on demographics, geography, economy and unique local hazards. Once these are known, the standard describes steps that should be taken to form a mitigation plan—and it’s worth noting in this context that this is a hazard mitigation plan, not a response plan.

At this stage of the process, it is critical that the fire department also pull in external stakeholders who can share their input and team up to create effective, long-term mitigation strategies.

Strategic planning

A critical step for any fire department looking to improve its life safety efforts is the development of a strategic plan. Strategic plans are developed by a team of individuals comprised of stakeholders from within and without the fire department, including community organizers, city council members and the Chamber of Commerce.

The team should first identify what they consider to be an appropriate mission statement for the fire department, which likely emphasizes the existing strengths related to emergency response. Part of the strategic plan should include a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the fire department’s organization and operations. Briefly, a SWOT analysis covers:

• Strengths: Those aspects of service delivery in which the fire department excels.
• Weaknesses: Aspects of service delivery which the fire department has identified as important, but in which they do not excel. Another important part of assessing the fire department’s weaknesses is addressing gaps in the services provided and the expectation of services held by the public.
• Opportunities: Correct discernment of changing demographics, economic and social trends and organizing fire protection to reflect any changes in the community. The opportunities assessment should also gauge the potential for collaboration with other government bodies or private safety advocacy groups in order to address safety issues.
• Threats: What obstacles does the fire department face in accomplishing its core mission of maximizing fire and life safety? These may be structural problems within the fire department (e.g. failing to perceive the need for change), problems with oversight from other public officials (budget, support for life safety initiatives from elected officials), or inability or unwillingness to forge partnerships to overcome fire safety problems.

Some of the factors that will be evaluated in this analysis include approachability and community outreach, social media and public service announcements, support services, coordination among city service agencies, public fire safety education, to name a few topics related to life safety. Many fire departments find that they are rated highly on approachability and outreach, but that, ultimately, citizens are unsure of what sorts of life safety education and fire prevention services are offered by their fire department. Fire service managers must address this knowledge gap so that the public knows how exactly their fire department is able to help them.

At the conclusion of the plan, the team must identify objectives that will move the department forward, particularly in the areas where there are weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Generally speaking, across the United States, fire departments are very slow to adopt this kind of responsive and progressive organizational philosophy. However, just as a battalion chief must assess how his or her incident action plan is working at a structure fire, so too must the fire department administrative staff assess how well a strategic plan is being implemented.

With this in mind, let’s review some common issues and suggested changes in greater detail.

Community outreach vs. public education

Organizations often lack an understanding of the differences between community outreach and public education. The former is a “hearts and minds” function, with the fire department making itself visible at community events in order to show the services offered by the fire department and talk about the actual work performed by firefighters. The latter is an educational lesson delivered by fire department personnel with defined learning objectives.

There are two sticking points here. The first is that community outreach is a relatively easy goal to reach. If a local fire company is seen handing out stickers and plastic helmets at the neighborhood park or church picnic, then the community leaders and city council are happy, and it gives the impression that the fire department is engaged in some sort of life safety education mission. A respected fire chief I know refers to this approach as “all show and no go.”

The second sticking point is that in the aftermath of the Great Recession, many fire departments cut professional educators from their staff, leaving fire suppression personnel to deliver public education with no training, no budget and very little organizational support. The sad fact is that even if this department was to try delivering an actual educational program, they might not do it very well without a substantial investment in adding staff and personnel training.                                                                                                                                                             

Code enforcement

Fire code enforcement is often a can of worms that the lay public usually regrets opening. A lack of qualified, appropriate staff for fire inspections as well as inspections not being performed in a timely manner are often weaknesses. While this mostly applies to commercial and public occupancies as designated in the fire code, in many cities, inspection and safety in private residences falls to the Housing Authority. Unfortunately, another salient problem is the possibility of a Housing Authority’s own poor record of completing quality inspections. Moreover, there is often no mechanism in place for fire departments to communicate potentially unsafe code issues to the Housing Authority, assuming they’re even looking for them. Not only must there be a system of accountability for Housing Authority personnel tasked with fire code inspections, but these people—indeed, any organization with local responsibility for fire or building codes—have to be included in the risk reduction strategic planning process.

Accountability

Another common issue in cities facing a life safety crisis is that public agencies are working with a remarkable lack of accountability in setting and achieving life safety objectives. Within the fire department, operations personnel are often not accountable for passing on fire code and life safety information to public education and community outreach personnel. These personnel are in turn not accountable for ensuring a follow up or referral to the correct outside agency. Further, Housing Authority inspectors are often not accountable for passing on risk trends or other relevant information they find in private residences to the fire department, and the result is two organizations dedicated to preventing fire that don’t speak and often work at cross-purposes. Improving communication and cooperation among divisions of the fire department is a key step to addressing this concern.

Public’s lack of knowledge

Lastly, there is the problem of the public not knowing what fire prevention and public education services are offered to them. But it’s understandable that they wouldn’t know because, as indicated in the section about strategic planning, fire departments often seem unsure of what prevention services to offer or how to deliver them.

There is an opportunity in the intentional vagueness related to risk reduction in a strategic plan—an opportunity to pull in the stakeholders like trauma centers, the Housing Authority, property management companies and others in order to identify the risks in private housing and collaborate on intervention tactics. Before this can happen, though, the stakeholders must be willing to talk to each other. There must be willingness among each agency or group to admit that the problem goes beyond the capabilities of any one organization.

Concluding thoughts

When tragedies strike, elected officials often claim that, “no one could have foreseen this.” But that is simply not true. Trend-watchers, data-crunchers and progressive planners across the American fire service know that when socioeconomically stressed populations are forced into poor housing stock, there will be a corresponding increase in the incidence of house fires—and departments must be prepared to manage these situations.

A major problem is that fire inspectors and life safety educators are often deemed expendable when a fire department is facing budget cuts. Or, if those resources exist outside of the fire department, there is reluctance to invite them in to cooperate. The solution lies in strong, progressive leadership in municipal government and within the fire department. These cities need leaders who will look past pride, past practice and past organizational inertia to form flexible new teams in order to face their cities’ life safety threats.

No matter what the strategic plan says and how it is executed, it is all moot if the fire department has not internalized fire prevention and public education as a core value. This point is important enough to bear repeating: Fire departments must institutionalize fire prevention and public education as a core value. If this mission is not ingrained in a fire department’s DNA, how will they build teams in order to avoid life safety crises? How can poor, stressed cities expect to affect lasting changes in the community’s fire risk? This is the fight before the fire.