Fire alarm boxes the solution
I would like to make a thematic connection between Bill Manning’s excellent article “A Right Way and a Wrong Way” (Editor’s Opinion, December 1999) and the December 1999 articles “Hurricane Tests Emergency Communications” and “Dispatchers: Some Things Haven’t Changed (And They Should!).”
Bill Manning is 100 percent right to put the good of the fire victims back in perspective. Very few of us got into this job to make ourselves safe. The fire service is all about saving the potential fire victims and their homes and jobs, even when it becomes tough or dangerous or expensive for us.
That is why I was upset by the hurricane article, whose focus was on how the emergency services maintained internal communications. Those efforts were undoubtedly honorable and deserved recognition. My problem is with communities that rely 100 percent on the commercial telephone industry for public fire reporting and who are then left in the lurch when the industry screws up. It is disgraceful, on the verge of the 21st century, that a mere flood at one location could have knocked out the only means for the public to report a fire. I heard from reliable sources that it would appear that a combination of overcentralization and lack of vigilance by one particular company left citizens unable to quickly and reliably reach the fire department or EMS. In the town where I live, it meant a 37-minute delay in relaying an ambulance call and to a mistaken location at that. In the town where I am a firefighter, it meant that the workers in a metal shop had to drive to another city to call the fire department for an electrical fire directly under an exposed metal-truss roof.
There is a solution. If your town has a fire alarm box system, keep it. Maintain it in good order, and don’t rent out the responsibility of public fire safety to distant corporations that are not directly responsible to the local residents, as you are. If you never had a municipal alarm system, or were unfortunate enough to remove it, then consider a wireless radio fire alarm system or a system of leased lines (not digital communicators) monitored directly by the fire department.
Not every resident in northern New Jersey was rendered unable to call the fire department because of the hurricane. Many towns and cities, including the ones where I live and fight fires, have a municipal fire alarm box system that is in good order. In fact, at least four Bergen County communities have added fire alarm boxes this past year, in anticipation of Y2K. If you want something done right, do it yourself; if you want the public to be able to reliably and instantly call the fire department, maintain a municipal fire alarm system independent of the telephone and electric companies.
(Note: This letter reflects my views and not the views of my department.)
Larry J. Robertson,Firefighter,Bogota (NJ) Fire Department
Calculating injury rates
I read with interest Michael J. Vatter’s article “The Impact of Staffing Levels and Fire Severity on Injuries” (August 1999). I do not disagree with his conclusion: “Those who argue that the fire service can achieve a near zero injury rate are mistaken. Firefighting is dangerous work.”
However, I am at a loss to understand how he calculated his various injury rates. There are two standard formulas in the safety community that must be used to accurately portray the frequency and severity rates for a given organization, albeit a jurisdiction, a state, or the nation.
Frequency or incident rate is one calculation and severity is another. These formulas are as follows:
Total # of Injuries
Total Hours Worked 2 200,000 = Frequency
Total # of Lost Time Injuries
Total Hours Worked 2 200,000 = Severity
The 200,000 (hours) is a constant used to represent a workforce of 100 employees working full time over a year (50 weeks, allowing two weeks of leave).
If Vatter uses these numbers and they show significant increases, his argument for additional staffing has much stronger validation.
Roger A. McGary, Assistant Chief, Safety Officer, Montgomery County Division of Fire & Rescue Services, Rockville, Maryland.
Michael J. Vatter responds: Roger Mc- Gary states in his letter that he is unsure as to the methodology I used to calculate the injury rates in my article. As with any long paper edited for audience and size, the data tables and the calculations were edited out of the published article. The numbers for the Newburgh Fire Department are the actual numbers of fireground injuries sustained during the study period. Injuries that occurred in situations other than responding to, returning from, or operating at fires were not included.
Conforming to the format of an applied research project for the Executive Fire Officer Program required the development of research questions. The stated goal of the project was to identify factors that may have influenced the number of injuries and their possible relationships to one another.
Several injury-related issues were identified from the data. The first was that there was a drop in the average number of fireground injuries after the shift staffing was increased. The second issue identified was that as the number of severe fires spiked, so, too, did the number of injuries. The regression analysis demonstrated that there was an inverse relationship between shift strength and injuries. It also indicated that there was a direct relationship between the number of severe fires attended and the number of injuries sustained. In other words, using the actual number of severe fires, multiple alarms, and shift strength, the likelihood of a change in the number of fireground injuries can be demonstrated given a change in any of the three variables.
In my original research, I was not looking for injury rates per se, only to test for possible relationships between fire severity, staffing, and injuries. However, for the purposes of this reply, I applied our data to McGary’s formulae for frequency and severity of injuries per one hundred employees. I am pleased to note the following: The mean frequency of injuries from 1988-1997 was 80.80 with a standard deviation of 24.5. The mean severity of injuries for the study period was 36.47 with a standard deviation of 17.8. I then calculated the averages before the staffing increase and after.
For the period of 1988-1993 (before), the mean frequency was 90.47 injuries, and the severity was 41.0. It dropped precipitously during 1994-1997 (after). The frequency of injuries was 66.29, and severity was 29.67. Lastly, the year that started this research project, 1995, was a terrible year in terms of frequency (102.7) and severity (66.20), both of which are clearly beyond one standard deviation. The combination of the formulae provided by McGary and the multiple regression model from my research is cause for continued research to demonstrate, mathematically, the strong relationship between staffing levels and injuries.
Firefighting is dangerous, and those members of the fire service who argue that we can achieve a near-zero injury rate are deluded. As long as the fire service does not have control over the number or severity of fires to which we respond, firefighters will be injured. We should always work to maximize the safety of our firefighters and to minimize the risks. However, to expect that we can fight fires and not get hurt is as na
One additional note: I am writing this in the long shadow of the Worcester tragedy. However, I cannot help but think that if six police officers were killed in a gunfight, every elected official would be screaming for more MONEY for cops and equipment. Who is fighting for us?
