How To Communicate the Need For Fire Defense Master Planning

How To Communicate the Need For Fire Defense Master Planning

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PUBLIC RELATIONS

Public speaking is very often a difficult task for the average person. Fire service members are no exception. They are often unable to effectively communicate their position when speaking before a government body, such as the city council.

Many fire service proposals do not receive council approval because of the fire service representative’s weak presentation, not because the proposal lacks merit. In this article, I will discuss the tools and techniques you can use to “sell” the idea of master planning, and eventually the completed plan, to the appropriate government officials. But, before I get into the nuts and bolts, here’s a brief explanation of the need for master planning.

BACKGROUND

The mission of the fire service is to preserve life and property while safeguarding the environment and the community’s economic base. Traditionally, fire departments have accomplished this mission while leaving all community master planning and decision making to the people at City Hall.

However, conditions in the 1980s have made it necessary for fire service members to change this head-in-the-sand approach. Some of the new forces affecting current legislation include: austerity financing (Proposition 13 in California), the citizen demand for civil servant productivity, and the advent of new fire suppression technologies and methodologies.

Master planning can give your department a greater voice in the decisions that will affect their future. Unfortunately, most departments view master planning as a threat to their security.

If you would like to read further details of the master planning process, send for a guide book available from the National Fire Prevention and Control Administration, P.O. Box 19518, Washington, DC 20036 (Attn: NFSRD).

The finished plan will address subjects including, but not limited to, fire mitigation fees, station locations, manning, apparatus and equipment, prevention, building construction and plan checks, community education, ordinances in support of the plan, and more. It will even address personnel salary.

“SELLING” MASTER PLANNING

When you are planning your presentation to the city council, you must remember these three major elements:

  • Choose an effective spokesperson and carefully prepare his presentation;
  • Form a Citizen’s Fire Advisory Committee (CFAC), possibly the most powerful tool at your disposal;
  • Provide audiovisual aids and properly communicate their meaning.

Before you put these elements into operation, here’s a word of caution and encouragement about those government officials who hold the purse strings. First, you should assume that the council members know nothing about the fire service or the community’s fire problem.

Second, council members love thoroughly documented studies. You should submit a master plan document that addresses all the problems and provides various answers and alternatives. Completed studies serve as road maps for city administration and fiscal planning. Council members want to hear about proposals that call for increasing services to the public— but only if these services are necessary and cost-effective. And that’s exactly the goal of fire defense master planning—to provide the public with needed services at a reasonable cost.

Spokesperson

The first element in your council presentation is the spokesperson. He should be the department member with the best communication skills. He must possess a thorough working knowledge of the completed plan, speak clearly, and have a good speaking voice. Make sure you:

  • Select him early;
  • Provide him with the pay and incentive to attend every planning session from beginning to end;
  • Drill him on the plan—hold a dress rehearsal and ask questions the council might ask.

He must know the plan inside and out. He must know the intent behind every statement.

Committee

The second preliminary step in the planning process is to have the council create a CFAC. Here are some of the advantages to forming such a committee. The CFAC consists of 8-12 citizens from the community (two citizens for every council member) who are appointed by the council members. This group’s goal is to advise the council and the community on issues of fire safety.

Because they are average citizens with no political connections, they have nothing to gain or lose from the recommendations they make. Therefore, the council perceives their advice as impartial and representative of the community.

This committee should be formed long before the master planning process begins so that their reliability can be well established. Then, they must be included in every phase of the master planning process, from start to finish.

This group will naturally absorb the thought patterns of the fire chief, but their findings and recommendations will stand as their own. This can be a most powerful tool!

But, here’s one word of caution. Don’t manipulate these CFAC members. Be honest and up front in every dealing with them. If you once betray their trust, they will never trust you again, and your future recommendations will be suspect in their eyes. When it is time to have your plan approved, you need the CFAC standing beside you in full agreement.

Audiovisual aids

You now stand before the council. Their arms are crossed over their chests and their brows are furrowed. You can guess what they are thinking: “No matter what you say, we’re not giving you another cent for more men and apparatus.” And you really can’t blame them. In the past, the fire department’s answer to the increasing fire problem has always been the same: “We need more men and apparatus.” And then you begin…

“Ladies and gentlemen of the council, if you will direct your attention to the screen, I would like to show you a very frightening movie.” You then run a film that displays how quickly a house can be devoured by fire. Make sure it demonstrates, very graphically, the phenomenon called flashover. For an effective presentation, flashover should occur within 5-7 minutes after the film starts.

I saw such a movie. A baby crib with a synthetic mattress and head bumpers was ignited in the bedroom of an empty house with the windows open. Flashover occurred within 3 minutes!

When your movie ends, remain quiet for a few minutes—long enough so that the council can absorb the full impact of what they have just seen. You have created a very strong need to know; a hunger for more information. You must now maintain that momentum as you lead the council step by step up the information ladder to the point where they want to grant you approval for the master plan. Next, you produce the charts.

The first chart is the Standard Time-Temperature Curve (see Figure 1 below). You have seen this in the NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION ASSOCIATION (NFPA) HANDBOOK, 13th Edition, Chapter 8, but not with the insipient or burnout phases included. The insipient phase is most important to your presentation because this is where lives will be saved or lost.

Start your discussion at the left side of the curve, and describe how a fire begins and progresses through the several phases of its life toward burnout. I have found it very helpful to pick a typical scenario, suph as a businessman in a hotel room.

The guest falls asleep in front of the television set and drops his lighted cigarette in the overstuffed chair. He then wakes up and decides to go to bed, not realizing that ignition has occurred. The stuffing in the chair has begun to smolder and produce large quantities of lethal gases. (It will be helpful to describe some of the most harmful gases created by the burning of common household items and liquids, and their effect on living organisms.)

The room temperature may have reached 300-400°F at the ceiling, thereby preheating the structure for the eventual flashover. When the couch finally bursts into flame, the time-temperature curve takes a quantum leap, reaching 1,000°F within 3-5 minutes, 1,300°F in 10 minutes, and over 1,500°F in 12 minutes.

It is during this early period of free burning that flashover takes place. Once flashover occurs, all life within the enclosure is terminated. If there is sufficient oxygen and fuel in the structure, temperatures will reach and exceed 2,000°F. It is during this full involvement phase that the fire department can no longer mount an offensive interior attack and must withdraw to a defensive position outside.

The final phase of an unattended fire is burnout. For the average single family dwelling of wood frame and stucco construction, it takes an average of 30 minutes from open flame production to burnout. At this point in your presentation, it is essential that you remind the council that if the fire department doesn’t get to the structure and begin applying water in an effective manner before flashover, the structure and all life within it will be lost.

There is one other segment of this response model that is not directly involved with the fire department’s reaction time, but it is an important factor in the overall fire control problem. It is the first segment, Building Conditions. This refers to the building’s age, size, shape, water supply, accessibility, occupancy, built-in fire protection and detection systems. All these elements affect the fire department’s ability to apply water before flashover.

Your audience is now ready to see the second chart, The Fire Department Reflex Model (see Figure 2 above). This is a left-to-right sequential time line of events that always take place in the evolution of a fire. As you explain each segment of this model, your objective is to make the council aware of just how long each event can take, and the potentially fatal consequences of such delays.

The third chart (see Figure 3 on page 63) is a two-axis, single-slope depiction of the community’s occupancies, arranged according to low, medium, or high risk. The low-risk occupancies are placed on the line close to the axis intersection while the high-risk occupancies are placed toward the upper end of the slope.

The vertical axis represents risk, while the horizontal axis represents the resources available to fight fires. Due to space limitations, only one occupancy (high risk with 3,500 gpm required) is depicted. As long as the available resources correspond to the degree of risk, the fire problem is mitigated. When there are insufficient resources to handle the risk, the distance between risk and resource along the slope represents the probable life and fire loss for any structure under consideration.

In order to use this chart you must know how to determine whether an occupancy is low, medium or high risk. You do this by using fire flow calculations. There are two common methods. Under one system, called the Iowa State method, you can determine the estimated fire flow by calculating the structure’s total volume and dividing by 100. This is a quick and simple method that can give you a rough estimate of the amount of water it should take to extinguish a fully involved free-standing structure with no exposures.

If you want your fire flow studies to be more accurate, I suggest that you use the Insurance Service Organization’s (ISO’s) fire flow calculation method. It is then up to your department to determine the gpm requirements for the low-, medium-, and high-risk occupancies (see my estimations on Figure 3).

Now, here is where you bring it all together. Pre-select one very well known and beloved occupancy in your community, one with an estimated fire flow in excess of 3,000 gpm. It would seem that two fully manned 1,500-gpm pumpers should be able to handle this fire. But this isn’t true.

If you discount your master streams (these are primarily defensive in nature and can seldom be applied in an effective interior attack), the average fire flow per man on duty is 100 gpm. If you include master streams, this figure increases to 250 gpm per man. So, you can see that there is a big difference between the estimated flow (what a fully involved structure requires), available flow (the measure of your hydrant system and pump capacities), and applied flow (the actual amount of water the men can put on the fire).

Therefore, to adequately protect the high-risk target occupancy, you need 30+ men on duty at one time and pumpers that are capable of delivering 3,000 gpm. Since small communities cannot afford a fire department of this size, they must rely on alternatives to manual fire suppression forces. Master planning answers this need by addressing those alternatives.

For example, the need for that large fire department can be reduced if every high-risk occupancy is fully sprinklered. Long response times can be reduced by implementing automatic detection systems and automated dispatching. Fire station location studies can help to minimize pre-determined response times to certain high-risk occupancies or zones.

The master planning process will also help to identify the following improvements that can be implemented: Fire brigades in high-risk occupancies, mutual aid and automatic aid agreements, faster apparatus, automatic stop light switching devices, etc.

SUMMARY

If your presentation has been effective, you will have convinced the council of the need for improved life and fire safety. Your closing remarks should go something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen of the council, I ask that you adopt this fire defense master plan and make it an element of the community’s general plan.”

Long range fire defense master planning will give the fire service “destiny control.” The fire department will no longer have to wait for new policies to “roll down the hill” from City Hall.

And when it comes time to replace apparatus, increase manpower, open a new station, or expand services, the approval will be only a formality because these improvements were built into your plan. And your plan will be approved because you knew how to sell it in a positive and effective way.

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