As we move into June and July, fire marshals will be sitting down to a unique problem: how to begin performing code enforcement activities again after two to three months of COVID-19 forced isolation.
There are several facets of this issue to consider when trying to do the most good for the most people, especially as fire prevention professionals contend with potentially disastrous cuts as the recession extends. How does a fire department pick up when potentially as much as one quarter of its inspections went unperformed? How are you going to maintain high quality services with fewer resources?
Taking a scattershot approach will not best address your fire risks, and picking up where you left off may leave some serious gaps in your jurisdiction. What follows is a suggested method based on conditions in my area of approaching how to re-start a fire inspection program. Bear in mind that this is not meant to be a comprehensive approach as we would use in more settled times, but instead is a measured stopgap meant to find balance among safety, effectiveness, and limited time and resources.
Step 1: You have to start somewhere
Across all types of industries it’s acknowledged that the hardest part of coming back to work will be the start—but nothing good can come afterward until we commit to beginning. Whatever your department chooses to do, no future success will come without a plan. In our department’s case we can use our Community Risk Assessment (CRA) to guide us in determining where and how to do the most good with the remaining inspection year.
Additionally, we would be guided by best practices for inspection frequency as specified in the model codes: high hazard occupancies being inspected annually, medium hazards biennially and low hazard every three years. The model codes sort occupancies according to potential fire loss, but our jurisdiction chooses to place certain occupancies into the high-hazard category based on life risk to large numbers of people. A sample of our local-risk categories includes:
- High hazard: Factory and high hazard storage, Assembly (to include churches, bars and taverns, and restaurants), and Group R-1 residential occupancies (hotels and motels).
- Medium hazard: Mercantile and restaurants seating fewer than 50 people.
- Low hazard: Business and Storage.
Step 2: Sorting your information
Using the information from our CRA we found that in terms of fire duty, three of our stations were substantially busier than the others. Taking into consideration that we’re trying to do the most good (i.e. limiting the number of fires in our city) in a limited amount of time, these three areas will benefit the most from a targeted, temporary plan until our department decides how code enforcement will play out over the long term.
Our next steps are to determine which occupancy types we encounter most frequently, and which station areas have the most of each type of occupancy. In these three areas we find that there are 285 occupancies requiring annual inspection, and that gives us an easy starting point—bear in mind that some of these and other types of occupancies will have received an inspection prior to shelter in place orders, so the data will require additional sorting.
Using the guidance from our model codes, there are additionally 459 occupancies requiring biennial inspection (230 each year) and 602 low hazard occupancies (201 inspections per year). According to best practices. we would need to perform 716 inspections in the occupancy types found in these three station areas annually; for ease, we will use a “hip shot” estimate of 358 inspections needed for the remainder of 2020. Keeping in mind that in our small city the fire inspectors are our “and” people: fire inspection AND fire investigation, AND fire and life safety education, AND ad hoc plans reviewers, meeting the objectives identified by best practices becomes very difficult. Meeting 80-85% of that target for 2020 is likely more achievable and will keep fire prevention staff focused and efficient.
Step 3: Where to go? How long to stay?
Now that we know how many inspections need to be done according to risk, it’s almost time to send our inspectors back onto the street. But where? And how long to focus on each of the three busiest areas? To know this, we have to crunch the same numbers in a different way; in this case, nearly 60% of Assembly, Mercantile, and Business occupancies are located in our downtown and University districts, while a station area north of there holds three quarters of the city’s hotels and motels, which also require annual inspection.
This northern area also holds roughly 25% of all other occupancies, while the remaining station area holds about 15% of occupancies needing inspection. While planning our work so that all the high hazard inspections are performed, this suggests that for the final six months of 2020 our department could spend 15.6 weeks focused on downtown, 6.5 weeks on the north side, and 3.9 weeks in the remaining station area.
This is not only a time target; maintaining progress toward our goal of approximately 290 inspections for the rest of the year will require weekly status updates on where inspectors have been working and what types of occupancies they’ve been in. This is generally not done on a weekly basis by fire prevention staff, usually landing under the umbrella of an annual report or strategic plan, but if we’re serious about maximizing our effectiveness in a closing window fresh information will be vital to tracking progress and reducing the city’s risk profile.
Conclusion: Nobody’s perfect
Based on your own experience and conditions in your own cities, many of you may have poked some holes in this plan—and you’re right, it’s not perfect. It’s not meant to be; it’s meant to be a starting point to get the code enforcement program moving again, and will probably have to be adjusted based on evolving needs and conditions. For example, Factory and Storage occupancies aren’t addressed in our stopgap plan, although there are none of these in our busiest station areas, and we don’t know how we will balance response to citizen requests and complaints as well as other fire prevention duties with the revised inspection schedule.
Also, not all occupancies of all types may be fully open in the coming weeks, which will alter the plan. In considering these facts, it benefits fire marshals to consider that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and as our cities adjust to living with semi-permanent pandemic conditions, planning code enforcement down to the smallest degree will ensure failure. Our proposed plan is a realistic assessment of what’s possible in our city while improving life safety for the greatest number of people and allowing us to gather information on how fire prevention staff will have to work going forward.
Hopefully, your fire marshal is thinking and planning along the same lines. Good luck, and stay safe!
