For more than 30 years, fire departments across America have taught and encouraged individuals to learn traditional cardio-pulmonary resuscitation methods in the event they should witness a sudden cardiac arrest. That‘s about to change.

A few years ago, Sarver Heart Center, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Arizona’s Bureau of Emergency Services and the Arizona Fire Chiefs Association formed a cooperative program called Save Hearts in Arizona Registry & Education or SHARE.

Under the program, 38 Arizona fire departments have been instructed in cardio-cerebral resuscitation, a method for use only on adults. Dr. Bentley J. Bobrow presented the statistics based on the switch to CCR this week at the Arizona Fire Chiefs Association’s annual meeting.

“We cannot do what we cannot measure, and the first step in addressing a problem is to document it,” said Bobrow. “A bystander doing CCR triples your chance of survival, and Arizona is the only state that has been able to publish its statewide cardiac survival rate.” This fall, the results of the SHARE research will be presented to the American Heart Association.

CPR calls for two mouth-to-mouth breaths after 30 chest compressions. CCR is 200 chest compressions immediately followed with shock and the sequence is repeated. “We have a tremendous tendency to over ventilate people,” Bobrow said. “It‘s the kiss of death. Focus on chest compressions … 200 chest compressions, uninterrupted by pulse checks.”

Bystanders who witness a sudden cardiac arrest tend to not do CPR because of the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but might be willing to do CCR because it doesn‘t involve ventilation. Glendale Fire Chief Mark Burdick has set a goal to teach CCR to 25,000 people in his city annually. Also all volunteers for Super Bowl XLII will be taught CCR. “The goal is to train as many people as possible,” said Burdick.

Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest and “only a fraction survive,” Bobrow said. “Out-of-hospital cardiac-arrest survival rate is usually very low.” In fact, one fire department’s survival rate with CPR was 2.6%. After being trained and switching to CCR, the fire department’s survival rate increased to 9.1%. Another department’s survival rate just from 3.7% pre-CCR to 33.9% after CCR was implemented. Eleven of 38 departments are now using the new CCR protocol.

“It‘s more than just saying a fire department is doing it,” said Bobrow. “It‘s about if you are actually doing it. It comes down to compliance.” He compared the response of an emergency medical crew to a NASCAR pit crew. Each member of the emergency medical crew has a specific part to play, and timing is critical. “Even a 10 second interruption is enough to decrease survival,” he said.

So far this year, more 270 lives have been saved in Arizona using CCR. “In 25 years, nothing has shown improvement in survival rates,” said Bobrow. “The whole country is watching what we‘re doing here in Arizona.”

Other areas of the country also are switching to CCR. In Wisconsin, Rock and Walworth Counties have introduced Call and Pump, a “simplified CPR. It is a rural implementation of an urban effort that was initiated … in Tucson, AZ by Drs. Ewy and Kern of the Sarver Heart Center.”

The value of any department’s fire and life-safety program is rarely known, but recently we had a call that personally helped me measure the success of our public-education programs. While it turned out to be a fire with less than $100 loss, it was one where despite the adult resident, smoke detectors and proper actions made the difference.

It began with a caller who originally had phoned the police department’s non-emergency number saying there was a smoke alarm going off for some “unknown reason.” The police clerk on duty had buzzed my office to ask me what I wanted done with the call. I had the clerk hand the call over to our 911 dispatch center, and within a few seconds I heard the tones drop for a three engine, ladder and rescue response. The answers to whatever questions the dispatcher had asked the caller obviously upgraded the call to a structural response. The residential fire wasn’t far from the station, so I decided to get into my car and tag along.

The first-arriving unit reported smoke detector activation on the first floor with all occupants out of the building. The adult resident didn’t believe anything was wrong, but her three school-age children insisted that she call the fire department and evacuate the house. The initial engine and ladder companies searched the residence and found a small fire in the kitchen caused by a plastic container on top of the toaster. The melted plastic was very close to damaging the toaster and keeping it in a constant “on” position that eventually would have caused a more serious fire.

When the fire officer asked the children how they knew what to do, they answered that they had learned to get out and call the fire department from firefighters who they met while visiting the fire station and firefighters who had subsequently visited their schools.

So despite the best efforts of the adult either to ignore the smoke alarm because nothing was visible to her or to call a non-emergency number when her children insisted she call the fire department, eventually the children’s perseverance paid off and the responding firefighters found the problem before it became a major incident. Those children’s diligence and perseverance came as a result of the public-education programs offered to them through our department, and they provided me with a measure of success, even if only one incident at a time.

How have you been able to measure the success of your public-education programs?Do you have any documented incidents where fire and life-safety programs made the difference?

Earlier this year, Chesterfield Fire & EMS responded to an early morning blaze in the Village of Ettrick, an unincorporated area southern end of Chesterfield County, Va. The 1.5-story single-family dwelling on Totty Street was practically outside the backdoor of Fire Station #12, home to Engine and Truck 12. Though those units were on scene within minutes, the 6:30 a.m. fire already had an advantageous head start. Intense smoke and heat from the fire claimed the lives of two young children, and a third child suffered burns and smoke inhalation. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a multiple-fatality fire in Chesterfield County; in the early 1980s four children lost their lives in another early morning fire in a single-family dwelling. This fire prompted me to think about the stuff that firefighters do every day to help make Chesterfield County a safer place to live.

Working smoke detectors in family dwellings are the real deal. One big factor in my not being able to readily recall the last multiple-fatality fire is the great work that we’ve done in pushing the installation of smoke detectors and ensuring that they work. We put them up for free, we hand out batteries for free, and we check them for free while on other calls for service. Many firefighters can recall stories that either begin or end with, “if not for the smoke detector going off.” Unfortunately, there were no smoke detectors in the dwelling on Totty Street.

The challenge today is to ensure that immigrant populations get the smoke-detector message. We must work to ensure that there are working smoke detectors in every family dwelling that we go into. This is going to require a different strategy because of the language barriers. We‘re working to establish working relationships with existing community groups like churches and social service agencies that already have connection with these new populations to get our message out. Many of these folks are on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, their housing is in poor condition, and that housing is more densely populated.

Fire company in-service training scenarios aren‘t make-believe. Green Bay Packers coaching legend Vince Lombardi once said, “perfect practice, makes perfect.” Every officer that I’ve ever known who has had responsibility for developing in-service training has tried to provide realistic scenarios that challenge firefighters to “practice well so we can play well.” Each of the fire companies in our combination system — we have three platoons of 22 engine companies and five truck companies, approximately 600 career and volunteer personnel — receives a full day of in-service training three times per year. Many of our in-service scenarios over the past couple years have featured a burned-out stairwell or a fire-threatened stairwell as a critical factor. The house on Totty Street had stairwell that was completely burnt out, denying access to second floor via the stairwell.

We are a fire & EMS department. Like many of our colleagues across the country, about 70% of our calls for service involve EMS. Of the remaining 30%, many are calls for a wide range of services having little connection to structural firefighting. In the words of Gordon Graham, noted speaker and subject matter expert in the area of organizational risk reduction, fighting fire has become a low-frequency, high-risk activity for our department and many like us. Therefore, we must continually be prepared, regardless of where we are stationed, to engage in the physically and emotionally charged atmosphere of firefighting where lives are on the line. Our “first name” is still Fire.

When five firefighters from one Chicago fire station were diagnosed in 2000 with similar types of cancer, people became concerned that something within the old fire station itself was causing the illnesses. Eventually the fire department tore down the building and replaced it.

Exhaust fumes and air quality frequently are sited as a cause or contributing factor in firefighter cancers, and the list of possible carcinogens gets longer all the time, but a recent outbreak of skin disorders in one California fire station has raised another concern about how firefighters can get sick inside fire stations.

The first California firefighter was told by a doctor that the red, swollen spot on his skin looked like a spider bite. But then another firefighter found a spot, and then so did another. And the spots became worse and more serious. Nine firefighters now are infected with varying severity, including one firefighter who almost lost his leg and another who has an eye swollen beyond recognition.

Two firefighters tested positive for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococus aureus, or MRSA, an infection caused by staph bacteria. The fire chief told us that the department doctor had never seen this type of infection outside of hospitals. An industrial hygienist explained that the outbreak was a “self-induced problem” and would require cleaning up the fire station and carefully reviewing procedures.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, MRSA is a type of staph infection that occurs most frequently among persons in hospitals and healthcare facilities and is resistant to certain antibiotics. The infection usually manifests as a skin disorder, such as a pimple and boil, and can occur in otherwise-healthy people.

“Repeated contact with the healthcare system,” is one of several risk factors that increase the potential for exposure and infection. While emergency medical technicians and paramedics are trained in precautions, MRSA is a particularly virulent bacterium. One emergency room nurse said that MRSA is contracted from bodily fluids, and treatment for the infection requires isolation procedures [gloves, masks, gowns] and intravenous antibiotics for eight to 10 weeks.

If these types of infections or other airborne diseases are present in fire stations, then housekeeping needs to be kicked up several notches. Some recommendations to prevent the spread of staph infections are simple; they include the use of gloves and immediate washing of hands after gloves are removed.

The transmission of diseases raises many questions for a fire chief and demands a review of procedures. Consider procedures for cleaning stationwear used by EMTs, paramedics and firefighters. Do firefighters take their uniforms home and throw them in with the kids‘ jeans and socks? Volunteer departments need to be aware of cleaning turnout gear, as well as their personal clothing, to prevent exposing their families to infection.

Everyone goes home, but be careful of what you might be taking there with you.

I’ve written many articles about the great need for fire sprinklers, but let me make it clear that I also strongly believe in the need for the three Es of fire prevention: education, enforcement and engineering. All three are very important, but if I had to put them in order of priority, I would have listed them just as I did.

Education is most important because it targets the three main contributors to the fire problem in our country, who also are the main benefactors of our mitigations efforts: men, women and children. During his presentation at the 1947 President‘s Conference on Fire Prevention, NFPA‘s legendary Percy Bugbee said, “once every man, woman and child realizes and accepts in daily life the responsibility for simple fire prevention measures, death, injury and destruction by fire will be substantially reduced.”

Enforcement, or the carrots-and-sticks approach, reminds the recipients of these pub-ed efforts of the consequences and the associated liabilities of their failures. Engineering tries to decrease the risks and failure consequences and reduce the damage by limiting the fire growth and progression. I’m not referring to only the fire sprinklers here, but all available passive and active built-in fire protection technologies. In my mind, fire sprinklers are the means, not the end.

Generally, we in the fire service in general don’t put as high a priority on fire prevention as we should.

A few years back, I surveyed 32 major metropolitan fire departments from all across the country for my Executive Fire Officer Program research paper, “Fire Prevention in America at the Dawn of the New Millennium.” I found that an average of 3.5% of these departments’ budgets went toward fire prevention and about 3.8% of their personnel worked in their fire prevention division. If cities with smaller departments and townships with volunteer departments had been incorporated into these statistics, the results would have skewed even further down. That, my friends, is still the reality of fire prevention in America.

The book Public Budgeting: Politics, Institutions, and Processes states that “budgets are about values … budgeting is concerned with the translation of financial resources into human purposes. A budget then is a concrete expression of the values of society.” The book Public Administration in America explains that “budgets also should reflect the mission or purpose for a bureaucratic agency‘s existence. This suggests still another function of budgets, intentional or not: they represent the priorities of those who formulated them.” It is only fair to say that “intentional or not” based on the available statistics, fire prevention still isn’t a high priority for this country‘s fire service.

We focus extensively on fire suppression and are always in reactive mode responding to fires. Until that paradigm changes, our ability to do conduct education and enforcement is very limited because we don‘t have the resources. Therefore, it makes sense to focus more on the fire prevention parameter that we have some limited control over — engineering.

We must focus on the construction codes to provide for passive and active built-in fire protection technologies to reduce fire fatalities and decrease fire loss in our country, and that is precisely why I focus so much on fire sprinklers. I believe that based on the feasibility and availability of the current fire protection technology, automatic fire sprinkler systems present the most effective means of saving both occupants and firefighters. For now, sprinkers are the biggest bang for the buck.

How prepared are you or are your personnel for retirement? Have you consulted with a financial planner to establish a retirement plan or are you gambling that your pension and/or 401K investments will provide all of your financial necessities for retirement? Until a few years ago I was placing my entire retirement stake on my pension and 401K investments. After I began to work with a financial planner, my view and plan drastically changed.

As a probationary firefighter, I was advised to consult a senior department member who also was recognized as a firehouse retirement expert. He advised me to begin investing the maximum amount of funding that our 401K plan would allow. He counseled me that if I invested the 401K ceiling amount over my career, I could have a comfortable standard of living on retirement. He further explained that the benefit of a deferred compensation plan would be realized after I retired because I would be in a lower federal tax bracket during retirement. This expert understood the concept of compounded interest and was able to live a very comfortable life when he himself retired. Although his advise was a great initial retirement plan, it was not the most advantageous method to accumulate retirement wealth.

Career firefighters are in a unique position to plan for retirement due with pension systems. The benefit of tax deferral plans may be minimized for most firefighters if their pension plan is substantial.

For example, the State of Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System provides 50% of the top three earning years for 20 years of service and a 2.5% increase every year to a maximum of 80% at 32 years of service. The current deputy chief pay in Maricopa County is $77,644–$107,049. This will place most deputy chiefs in the 2006 federal tax rate of 25%. If a deputy chief maintains the top end of this pay scale for three years and retires with 32 years of service, he or she will retire in the same tax bracket as just before retirement. This also does not include any deferred compensation earnings, which will be taxed on withdrawal, or standard increases in pay that should occur due to performance or cost of living.

If a firefighter began deferring the maximum amount of funding on day one of their employment, he or she could accrue $500,000 to $1 million over the course of a 32-year career. Unfortunately this was one piece of advice from the retirement expert that I did not heed!

If a deputy chief chose to withdraw 8% per year of the maximized deferred compensation account — which would not affect the principle but would draw on a standard rate of interest the funds would be accruing — he or she would move to the 28% tax bracket. This is a great investment plan for the federal government, as you will be taxed at a higher rate and accumulated monetary value. Does this sound correct?

Both the retirement expert and the deferred compensation account representative advised me that the benefit to “deferring” my taxation was to withdraw my retirement funding when I would be taxed at a lower rate. Ric Edelman, a professional financial adviser illustrates this fact in his book, The New Rules of Money:

Thus, millions of Americans adopted the attitude that if they deferred income from the present to the future, they‘d accumulate more money, and if they waited until retirement to spend it, they‘d also pay less in taxes. None of this is true anymore…. With only five brackets for all taxpayers, it is highly unlikely that you will move from one bracket to another, even when you retire.

Strategic planning should be applied to your retirement planning efforts. If you aren’t working with a financial planner, do so immediately. A deferred compensation plan can be a huge asset in your planning effort, but with proper financial advice it should fulfill only one component of your retirement plan — do you want to pay now or pay later?

As Sen. Jack Reed once said: “The president has no real plan to address the fiscal challenges arising from the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, let alone a plan to fix Social Security.”

In the June issue of FIRE CHIEF, my colleague Chief Ronny Coleman mentioned the Patrick Lencioni book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team &mdash: A Leadership Fable. The reference reminded me of another work by Lencioni, Silos, Politics and Turf Wars. The book refers to when decisions are made in a vacuum without coordination or concern for the consequences that may be known, unknown or ignored.

Silos specifically came to mind when working on both elements of the National Response Plan and its coordination at the local response level with the emergency service functions that are outlined in it. There are several ESFs that clearly require either an exclusive response or a major response by fire service personnel. These include ESF 4–Firefighting; ESF–8 Public Health and Medical Services; ESF–9 Urban Search-and-Rescue; and ESF–10 Oil and Hazardous Materials.

If you picture the worst-case multi-location scenario in a natural disaster or coordinated terrorist event, it is easy to see elements of all of these coming to bear at once without even addressing rescue and gross-versus-technical decontamination of the public. The problem with this concept is that at the federal level, each ESF is run by a separate federal agency. Examples include the U.S. Forest Service for firefighting, the EPA for hazmat, FEMA for USAR, and Health and Human Services for public health and medical services. To some degree this creates a “silo effect” when planning for a national response that requires the simultaneous activation of many fire service resources into the federal response through several different responsible federal agencies. The unknown factor is who bedside the fire service will know that the firefighters assigned as resources in ESF–4 may be the same specialized resources in ESF –8 for a mass-casualty incident, ESF–9, or ESF–10 for decon.

The fire service has always been the go-to agency to handle any public safety issue that doesn‘t directly fall to law enforcement. Granted there are regional response teams that contain members from several fire departments organized for specialized emergencies such as a regional hazmat team, but how is the plan going to be affected when those resources, even those that are three to five deep in redundancy, are committed to other more basic functions in the response?

While we all understand why there are separate federal agencies with known expertise that are planning within their own ESF, how do we avoid them planning in “silos” so they don‘t exceed a combined realistic level of fire service response in these emergency service functions? The International Association of Fire Chiefs has been working diligently for the past two years to turn these silos into the spokes of a wheel where requests for assistance can be matched with the appropriate fire assets from across the country. Their untiring efforts will continue until a consensus plan is reached on how these assets will be activated and used in a disaster or national emergency.

The question for discussion becomes: Have you considered how much of your department do you need to retain when considering assistance to an EMAC or federal response knowing that backfilling positions and incurring overtime are not usually a recoverable cost? Or phrased another way, what assets can you afford to send to a long term outside response without jeopardizing the response needs of the community you serve?

Sometimes the only people who can understand your devastation are those who have experienced it themselves. Their “I survived, so can you” attitude can offer the most hope to a person in a difficult situation.

Cathy Hedrick is one of those people. The mother of a firefighter killed in the line of duty, Hedrick now works with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation‘s Taking Care of Our Own program. She understands what the families of the Charleston Nine are going through right now.

“It‘s going to have long term psychological impact on the department in Charleston,” she said, adding that as the results of the investigation are revealed, it will be particularly difficult on the families.

According to Kay Cross, interim director of human resources for Charleston, the city‘s employee assistance program responded immediately to help fire department personnel and firefighters‘ families cope with the tragedy. The South Carolina Firemen‘s Association approached the city and asked if the NFFF also could implement its peer support and Fire Service Survivors Network programs. The city agreed.

The peer support program trains behavioral health counselors and firefighters who already have experienced a loss how to counsel other firefighters who have experienced a similar loss. Similarly, the NFFF matches members of the Fire Service Survivors Network with those who face similar circumstances to, most importantly, remind new survivors that they are not alone.

“We‘re hoping the foundation will be [in Charleston] for 12 weeks, and then we‘re turning it over to the local Charleston Behavioral Mental Health Counseling unit,” Hedrick said.

The South Carolina Firemen‘s Association contributed money for the peer support program in the initial stages and donated an office for the program, “but it takes money to run the program,” Hedrick said. “We‘re trying to raise $100,000 for the peer support program in Charleston. This is the same peer support unit that we did in New York after Sept. 11, 2001.”

With 30,000 fire departments in the United States today, even if each one sent $3.50 to the City of Charleston Firemen‘s Fund, the Charleston Nine‘s co-workers and families will receive the emotional and mental support they need.

Please consider a donation to the City of Charleston Firemen’s Fund, c/o Bank of America, P.O. Box 304, Charleston, S.C. 29402.

Anger is a powerful emotion to deal with, and this particular fire has a lot of people angry.

As I watched the memorial service in Charleston with the nine flag-draped caskets, I thought about the legendary Francis Brannigan, who said, “When a combustible structure is involved in fire, the building is the enemy, and you must know the enemy.” But I believe that we need to take that even a step further. The problem doesn‘t start with the building; it starts with the construction codes. The building is an object, not an enemy. Our real enemies are the ones who allow such buildings to be built with little regard for the occupants‘ safety and even less regard for the firefighters‘ safety.

Considering that investigations still are underway in Charleston, I won‘t be specific to that particular fire. Some of their earliest reports, though, mentioned that multiple human errors and failures in housekeeping policies and procedures contributed to the ignition and the fast propagation of that fire. Those same human factors historically have been at the root of most commercial and residential fires. Take a look at the recent catastrophic multiple-fatality fires. Through June, there have been a total of 247 total deaths in 60 fires, and 142 (57%) of those fatalities have been children.

And it is precisely because of these failures and human errors that I strongly believe in fail-safe, built-in automatic protection.

I think that the Charleston Fire Chief Rusty Thomas might have been correct, in a way, when he said, “sprinklers would not have put out the fire but would have at least slowed it.” Had the fire sprinklers been installed, they would have most likely slowed if not stopped the fire progression. At the very least, they could have prevented flashover and catastrophic structural failure.

While fire sprinklers can‘t prevent fires, they can minimize the adverse consequences of failure once the fire has ignited. That is why I believe so strongly in fire sprinklers.

Also let me explain my use of the term “enemy.” I realize that it has a strong negative connotation and that it might sound contrary to what I have been writing about the importance of working with building officials in the International Code Council process and with the builders in the National Association of Home Builders to educate them to cooperatively change construction codes.

In my mind, the word “enemy” doesn‘t exclusively mean prolonged antagonistic relationships. Having an enemy, opponent or adversary truly calls for more diplomacy and negotiations. I don‘t view sprinkler opponents as mortal enemies in a classical term, but as adversaries that we must defeat with sound logic and science in the various code arenas.

With all due respect to our worthy adversaries in the code development process, their delay in acknowledging the value of fire sprinklers and embracing the use of such technology in all new construction is only prolonging the agony. They know quite well, especially after ICC final code hearings a couple of months ago, that it is only a matter of time before fire sprinkler systems protect all newly constructed homes in America. But the postponement is causing thousands of civilians‘ and firefighters‘ lives to be lost nationally each year.

I‘m not pointing the finger and merely blaming sprinkler opponents for the fire problem. We should first look at ourselves before blaming others. We in the fire service share that burden, too, and our low priority for fire prevention and lack of strong participation in the code development process are significant contributors to the magnitude of the fire problem in our country. If we truly want to address the fire problem in our country, we must first rearrange our priorities. Fire sprinklers save firefighters‘ lives, too.

Increasingly, firefighters are responding to situations where the R-13 residential sprinkler system has done its job: early activation for quick extinguishment or substantial control of a fire in its incipient stage. These systems are becoming more prevalent in the multi-family dwellings across the United States, but hopefully the fire service will become more successful in getting more of these systems installed in single-family dwellings. Residential sprinkler systems, unlike their commercial system cousins that are designed to protect property, are designed to provide for life safety by:

1. Providing a larger “window of escapability,” more time for occupants to evacuate the dwelling and




2. Keeping fire from reaching the point of flashover, thereby protecting firefighters.

As numbers of R-13 systems in the country continue to grow, fire service leaders need to ensure that our fire officers and firefighters have the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities to work with these systems to effectively ensure extinguishment of the fire and effectively address property conservation, the third incident priority. Most departments emphasize the first two incident priorities, life safety and incident stabilization, much more than property conservation. We remove heat, smoke and standing water following suppression activities, and then we cover window and door openings and return the building to its owner.

The fire service needs to adopt a new paradigm regarding property conservation. The lightweight building materials used in today’s family dwellings are very susceptible to water damage, especially from prolonged water exposure. When the fire occurs on an upper floor, gravity is a powerful force that exposes more interior exposures to water. We need to become more proactive in addressing the third incident priority, especially when sprinkler systems have been activated.

How can we meet this challenge? We need to focus some of our training and drilling efforts toward developing the salvage-technician skills of our fire officers and firefighters. Most of what we know we learned in entry-level firefighter training, and for many that training was a long time ago. Even for our newer folks, the amount of time allocated to the development of salvage skills is very limited; entry-level training programs tend to focus on development of fire suppression KSAs.

What should our training and drilling focus on? Here a couple of key objectives:

• Learn the location of all the occupancies in your district with R-13 sprinkler systems installed. Become familiar with the location of fire department connections and the control valves for those systems.




• Be aggressive in assigning responsibility for control of the system to a fire officer so that the system can be shut down as soon as fire control is achieved.




• Make an aggressive interior fire attack to get a fire stream to the seat of the fire and ensure complete extinguishment of the fire. Communicate to the incident commander as soon as possible when the system can be shut down. Continue to size-up the fire area for hot spots.




• Make aggressive water removal a key objective of the incident action plan. Tasks should include the use of water vacuum equipment as well as the covering of property and floors below the fire.




• Prompt homeowners and property managers to obtain the services of a professional disaster restoration company as soon as possible. Most of the water-removal equipment that we carry on our apparatus provides a good first step in water removal, but it isn‘t as effective and efficient as the water extraction equipment used by professional disaster restoration companies in minimizing water damage after the fire.

As R-13 residential sprinklers become more commonplace in our communities, our knowledge and skills as salvage control technicians will become more commonly in our efforts to conserve property following a fire. Many people, especially those outside the fire service, believe that residential sprinkler systems cause more damage than the fire because we continue to let the builders and developers control the residential sprinkler agenda. Those same people do not know that sprinkler systems keep the fire from rapidly growing to the point that it can trap occupants or inflict substantial damage on the structure. By becoming more skilled and practiced in salvage operations at these types of calls, we will have a positive influence on their perceptions. If we can do that, we‘ll increase public support for the installation of R-13 systems in our communities.