Fire Prevention Considerations During a Pandemic

Editor's note: Find Firehouse.com's complete coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic here.

With the nation preparing for major disruptions to everyday life amid the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, fire departments are struggling to maintain regular operations while enacting policies and procedures to slow the spread of the virus and protect personnel and the public.

Something that has been “lost in the shuffle” in many cases is a fire department’s preventative services. There have been a variety of modifications to fire prevention service delivery so far from totally closing down prevention services and reassigning that staff to operations, to only responding with an inspector to citizen complaints, or only attending testing of installed systems and other plans review or permitting activities related to new construction.

Even that may be changing. On March 18, Boston became the first city to halt work on all new construction, and it’s probable other cities will follow suit. Certainly nearly all community risk reduction (CRR) and fire and life safety (FLSE) activities have been discontinued, including:

• Home Safety Surveys
• School Presentations
• Fire Extinguisher Education
• Station Tours
• Targeted safety education to at risk populations

It might seem difficult in this moment, but as fire prevention professionals we have to look ahead—three months, six months, perhaps a year—to when this emergency ends. What will YOUR fire prevention division look like in six months? How will you address your service gaps? How will you work, manage, and hit performance objectives in an economy which will in all likelihood be in recession by that time? It’s too early yet to offer any firm solutions, but it’s past time to start thinking about these things.

Commercial inspections

Commercial fire inspections are perhaps the easiest of the preventative services to conceptualize because of the structured nature of fire code enforcement, so we’ll start there. Even in more settled times the fire prevention division is the most overworked and understaffed part of any fire department, so during this pandemic you’re probably starting from a position of already being behind.

Let’s assume the best case (and least likely) scenario, which is that COVID-19 will have peaked and settled in three months; not that everything will be over, just that by mid-June the crisis will have passed and normal services can resume. That’s an entire quarter of the inspection year during which no inspections were done, so how will you structure your work plan for the remainder of 2020? Do you pick up where you left off, and “write off” the inspections not performed during the end of the first quarter and beginning of the second? Do you start at your previous stopping point and keep going, understanding that by the end of the year you’ll still have roughly a quarter’s worth of inspections which were not performed?

By way of example, in my small city we use guidance from the fire code and best practices to determine that we should be performing about 2,400 inspections annually. Loosely, that’s a possible six hundred fire inspections that won’t be performed as a result of the pandemic. This naturally increases the fire risk in these occupancies, and depending on their hazard category (high hazards receive annual inspections, medium hazards are inspected biennially, and low hazards every three years) you have to face the possibility that some of these occupancies won’t receive a fire inspection for three to five years—a dramatic increase in fire risk and a glaring service gap.

How do we address this service gap during the pandemic? As a fire inspector, I am profoundly suspicious of the idea of business owners performing “self inspections,” but during a crisis they may work as a stopgap and at the very least turn their attention to fire safety practices in their place of business. If you choose to attempt a temporary self inspection program, it will require some work and forethought, through: effectively the authority having jurisdiction (AHJ) is delegating a core fire department service to untrained members of the public, so consider carefully what is included on the self inspection form.

The fire department also needs to get the word out that for the duration of the emergency, those businesses needing a fire inspection will be required to submit the completed form to the fire marshal within a specified period or face fines and/or other penalties.

Lastly, as we come to the end of the pandemic, fire prevention staff will need to update their records because in all likelihood some businesses will no longer exist by the end of the year. According to FEMA, approximately one third of business which suffer a disaster don’t reopen, and a pandemic certainly qualifies as a kind of disaster. Knowing this, your mental picture of your city as related to fire inspection will have to change as well.

FLSE initiatives

How about your FLSE initiatives? Because we are not able to inspect single family dwellings (SFD), our prevention efforts in these occupancies by necessity is solely composed of educational outreach efforts. In fact, 70-75% of all fires are happening in SFDs, and for the duration of the pandemic we aren’t addressing this critical risk category. How can you maintain a minimal level of service? It may be possible to leverage your social media footprint in order to provide home fire safety outreach, but I would offer a few caveats, such as:

1. Have a plan.

Too much of the fire service’s social media content involves humor, the social aspects of firehouse life and other “hearts and minds” posts. Very little in the way of local, impactful information is relayed, and when an attempt is made it is often a repost copied from USFA, FEMA or NFPA. If you decide that social media posting will be a part of your pandemic fire prevention services, you should create a three- to six-month plan for what gets posted, to which platforms, and when. Hopefully you’re already doing social media planning and scheduling to support your CRR efforts, but that is a topic for another time.

2. Determine the content.

Infection control and other information related to COVID-19, including closures, restricted business hours and access, etc. must of course be a part of your content. But when considering home fire safety, you will have to use your response data to determine which hazards to address with your social media platforms. That is, determine your most frequent types of fires, those with the most potential to injure or kill residents, and those with the highest average dollar loss; as we move into spring and summer some good starting points will be cooking safety (a perennial hazard), outdoor fire safety, electrical safety and home safety during severe weather.

3. Think outside the box.

A key component of any FLSE program is measuring outcomes—have the citizens really learned the safety objectives built into your lesson? This is nearly impossible to gauge because there’s little interaction in public safety social media, but the possibility exists for better educational outcomes through the use of Facebook and Instagram live posting, which will allow life safety educators to present a lesson online and respond to questions, or the creation of a fire department/fire prevention YouTube channel, which again allows educators and citizens to remain isolated while receiving life safety information tailored to your jurisdiction.

Another foundational block of FLSE service delivery is visiting schools to deliver life safety education, but with the closure of most public schools this isn’t happening right now, either. How (or if) this gap is addressed is mostly left up to the school districts as they decide when to resume instruction and who they let into their facilities, but the possibility exists that you will have entire classes of children who have not received any basic fire safety education depending on how you arrange your FLSE scheduling.

Many of these children, especially older elementary and middle schoolers, will be caring for themselves or younger siblings while parents are at work—or potentially quarantined or in the hospital—and they will not know how to make themselves fire safe. How will your FLSE staff make up that lost ground if you aren’t allowed back in schools, or if normal services resume during the summer? Are you comfortable “writing off” a large group of students who won’t know how to react during a fire?

These are all very serious, very difficult questions for any fire marshal or fire prevention division staff, but they can all be overcome—with enough time, people, and money. However, the last consideration I have for how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact delivery of fire prevention services is that most leading economists agree that a recession caused in part by the pandemic has already begun.

Services for the rest of this year will be determined by how successful we are as a nation in slowing the spread of the virus, but fire service administrators right now are preparing budgets for fiscal year 2021 under a very dark cloud. How a fire prevention division “recovers” from the pandemic is also going to depend on how quickly our municipal governments recover from the recession, and those of us who remember the Great Recession also remember that cities were 2-4 years behind private enterprise in their recovery.

The short term picture is very uncertain for delivery of quality, consistent fire prevention services, but in the long term we may be looking at significant structural damage to a department’s fire prevention capabilities as well. As fire prevention professionals weather the storm, we have to keep an eye on the horizon: leverage technology, build and maintain partnerships, demonstrate the necessity of fire prevention, and fiercely advocate for the fire prevention division both within the department and with your elected officials.

Good luck, and stay safe!