Forget the traditional road map for a minute, the road map we are referring to here is really a process of evaluation leading to strategic planning. It is an in-depth analysis of how the fire department deploys its resources.  Why is that important? Well, consider the investment a community makes inproviding fire protection services. That investment is a cost like any other public service and should be subject to the same control and management applied to other municipal department budgets.  

The cost of public fire protection in the US is significant and rising, as are the losses caused by fires. American communities, in part because of our national culture, have always assumed the burden of providing public fire protection. In most cases, public fire protection is simply the fire department. Unfortunately, from the national to the state to the local level, we pay only lip service to technical efficiencies such as automatic firesprinkler systems and fire codes that could help to reduce fire protection costs. Requiring the installation of automatic fire sprinkler systems reduces total loss in dollars due to fire and helps to save lives and by implication, automatic sprinkler systems could ultimately help to reduce the cost of public fire protection.

While sprinkler systems reduce fire losses, do not reduce the need for a fire department they simply allow for a smaller and more efficient one. Since we are not moving toward a universal mandate for sprinklers, we should instead seek efficiencies in how we manage and deploy fire services.  Funded in the municipal budget, the local fire department competes for tax dollars as do the police, public works, and school system. To highlight efficiencies, police chiefs long ago recognized the value of agency accreditation to validate the management controls applied within their individual departments. Within the past few years, fire chiefs have begun to recognize the value of national accreditation.

The foundation of fire service accreditation rests upon the so-called standard of cover (or the SOC). The SOC is actually a creation of the British Fire Service. In Great Britain, the Home Office used the SOC to manage their collective fire services nationalized after WW II. It only took 50 years for this revolutionary concept to make its way across the big pond to America. Today, the best and most effective American fire departments have developed their own standard of cover to qualify and quantify the level of service provided.

By definition, the standard of cover consists of…those written procedures that determine the distribution and concentration of fixed and mobile resources of a fire agency within a given community. (Source: (http://publicsafetyexcellence.org) The SOC is applicable fulltime and volunteer fire departments, both large and small. At its core, the SOC defines the most appropriate levels of service for a community based on risk and available resources because no one size fits all.  PolicyOne recently conducted a resource deployment study for the Fire Departmentof the City of Lewiston, Maine. A large part of that evaluation included a study of fire station locations using GIS software. PolicyOne provides basic and advanced analysis of municipal fire services. See what we have to offer by visiting our fire service webpage at: http://www.policyoneresearch.com/FireService.asp