Fire Chief

My previous comments come from the energy of having groups of people nationally networked in an e-mail group called ePARADE. The ePARADE group is a simple Yahoo group composed of more than 400 fire marshals and fire and life-safety professionals who originally got together and identified a communication gap among fire marshals.

The ePARADE has generated advice and familiarity across the continent, identifing problems and in general enabling critical discussion in real-time among people with passion for prevention. Some of the fine writings by national fire prevention leaders such as Ozzie Mirkhah, Jim Crawford and Ed Comeau were influenced by discussions in ePARADE. Crawford initiated and works at the head of a National Strategic Prevention Alliance, which recently has been awarded a substantial FIRE Grant. Good things happen when serious people become familiar and discuss serious issues.

I think Comeau used great innovation in using a very common and free feature of Google to track and visualize the multiple death fires. Look here at the power of seeing a problem right before your eyes. Using Google’s free mapping feature may lead to the right people noticing the multiple death fires who, in turn, ask the right people what are we doing about this.

There‘s evidence that people begin to pay attention to an idea when you start to receive requests for more detailed data. The ePARADE gets passed around like a useful book or magazine does at the station. E-mails are circulated beyond the group, which I think is a good thing. I heard from a Consumer Product Safety Commission staffer who inquired if we had detail fire cause of all those multiple-fatality fires — everyone suffers a gap in information about fires in the United States. I think it would be great if we could pass around real-time data about the fire problem.

I knew as soon as Comeau mentioned that he would map the multi-death fires, that it would tell us something that is not evident on the surface when you only view (or ignore) one fire at a time. Information presented visually, if it is done well, can have a dramatically revealing quality. When I saw the map, I was taken abackr. Seeing it takes the viewer to a higher level of understanding. The next step for people who like to analyze stuff finding out about the, who, what, when, where how of fires. Now this is not a lesson on effectively presenting visual information, but if you want to pass on to your planning and analysis staff some excellent approaches to presenting effective visual information, tune them into Edward Tufte whose seminal book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is a must-read for effective presentation.

In the case of the Multiple-Fatality Fire Map it tells you where these fires are occurring and where they aren’t occurring. As I recall, there is higher propensity for a multiple-fatality fires to occur east of the Mississippi River. There are some states and whole regions where there have been no reported multiple-fatality fires. Why were whole areas with multiple states able to do this while other single states were plagued with numerou multiple-fatality fires? What conditions are different? In terms of the Pareto Principle, what 20% root behavior cause leads to 80% of these fires? When I say root cause, that‘s either fire cause or the root cause of the circumstances that rendered the people unable to escape the fire.

Here is an opportunity for us to focus on a piece of the fire death problem and try to reduce the risk. If fire deaths stay in the 3,000 to 4,000 range for 2007, as they have been for a few years, then these multiple-death fires could be as much as 6% to 8% of the total deaths. Will all these states that have had more then four of these fires be the same next year? One state had seven multiple death fires and one had six multiple death fires. Previously I referenced the spread sheet with the list of the known multiple-death fires. A bunch of states had four and five multiple death fires. If we were to focus on reducing these states‘ statistics by 50%, this will reduce the number of deaths significantly nationally.