BY BILL MANNING
About two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote a two-part editorial exposing the dire straits of our National Fire Incident Reporting System and the mangled conversion to NFIRS Version 5.0. Those articles, plus a shorter follow-up, “The Fire Data Boneyard,” in the July 2003 “Editor’s Opinion” column, require no justification or apology. The need for broad-based, timely, usable fire department incident data is stronger than ever.
The operative words are broad-based, timely, and usable. The yearly report from the National Fire Protection Association is timely, and great to have and use. But broad-based it is not. If we could put all our stock into a 3,000-fire department survey with extrapolated statistics, there’d be no need for NFIRS in the first place.
Because as yet no one in a position of responsibility has been willing or able to answer, we have to ask again, Where are the broad-based, timely, usable NFIRS data? They’re sitting in a dusty basement in Emmitsburg. One static report from 1998 doesn’t cut it for the 2003 fire service.
Data are powerful when used effectively. Our friends in law enforcement (the “historians with guns”) have leveraged their data to market crime, by which they win public support and big federal money. Broad-based fire statistics have not been well marketed, in part because NFIRS is a mess, and look where we are. Law enforcement is running our grant money in Washington, for crying out loud.
In historical terms, law enforcement, with 70 years of collecting crime statistics, has had a huge head start over the fire service. But that in no way absolves the fire service or the Federal Emergency Management Agency/United States Fire Administration for failing to get its data act together in 30 years. Excuses are plentiful, solutions in short supply. The longer this goes on, the longer the fire service and the public suffer.
FEMA/USFA and the National Fire Information Council (NFIC) deserve every bit of negative press they receive, and then some, for their astounding lack of leadership that’s resulted in the NFIRS 5.0 debacle. But it’s fire service apathy that allows the problems to continue unsolved. How much longer do we need to fool ourselves with the familiar excuse, “Firefighters are action-oriented people who don’t do reports”? Never before has a subject of such national fire service importance been met with almost complete silence. I feel like the town crier in the Land of the Deaf.
So I was surprised to receive a letter in response to my July editorial from NFPA’s Dr. John Hall and Ms. Marty Ahrens, in which they play the role of chief apologists for FEMA/USFA and NFIRS. I print it in full in the Letters to the Editor section of this issue.
But give me a break. Hall and Ahrens are swimming in their own Sargasso Sea of spin. The NFPA—the $70-million-a-year publishing company (read: vendor) that masquerades as a fire service organization and sometimes as a quasi-government agency—coming to the rescue of USFA is as straight as Halliburton defending its sweetheart government contracts on 60 Minutes. NFPA and USFA are sleeping together.
Their letter strongly suggests that Hall and Ahrens are shills for the real power players in the NFIRS affair. They’re good cover. But their arguments are elliptical, full of holes, hyperbolical, self-righteous, false, and, in a couple of instances, outright ludicrous (my personal favorite is the breaking news that USFA—not Intel or Microsoft—deserves the credit for fire service computer standardization). Most importantly, however, their arguments are evasive. They never answer the fundamental question: Where are the data? Hall and Ahrens can’t address this issue without implicating their masters. I wish they would have. They can’t.
Let’s forget that the FBI released the first Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data for 2002. Let’s forget that the UCR pulls together statistical reports from 17,000 local police departments. Let’s forget that the Consumer Product Safety Commission uses more reliable databases, and that property owners reference fire and building codes, not NFIRS, for heaven’s sake. Let’s forget that members of NFIC, during their numerous taxpayer-funded retreats to Disney World and other resorts, launched a strategy for government-socialized fire software. That FEMA/USFA’s idea of “mediating” the NFIRS 5.0 affair was to reward those who supported its goal of becoming a software vendor and press some boot rubber into the faces of those who didn’t. Let’s forget Hall’s characterization of USFA as “the supplier of last resort for NFIRS technology,” unless he’s speaking about something other than USFA’s DOS-based Polaris, MicroNFIRS, or Federal Client Tool, which were and are dismal failures. Let’s forget that all that remains of 30 years of NFIRS data in the National Archives are less than a million incident reports from 1997.
Forget all that, and everything else, including the FEMA Inspector General’s Report exposing FEMA/USFA’s illegal manipulation of NFIRS 5.0 contracts. Let’s say that NFIRS, as Hall and Ahrens suggest, is a “spectacular success” and that it really did result in firesafe pajamas.
And let’s “concede” that the intent of the Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 never was to provide timely fire incident data in a variety of packages and slices that could help the firefighters’ cause at the federal, state, and local levels. We can accept that’s not FEMA’s job. But that doesn’t mean because FEMA can’t or won’t do it, no one should do it.
FEMA/USFA: let someone else do it. FEMA/USFA: release our data (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), and the fire service and its real friends will find a way to take full advantage of it. What’s stopping you from doing that? Your documented technological impairments? Your turf-crazy arrogance? What?
Arguably, the most astounding aspect of this entire debacle is FEMA’s jealous guarding of your incident data—the incidents you went to, the data you input while navigating through NFIRS 5.0’s overreaching system. The federal government doesn’t own your data, the federal bureaucrats don’t own your data—you do.
Hall and Ahrens, in falling over themselves to “document” the “spectacular success” of NFIRS, failed to include some critical language in the Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974, which states, “The Administrator shall insure dissemination to the maximum extent possible of fire data collected and developed by the Data Center, and shall make such data, information, and analysis available in appropriate form to Federal agencies, State and local governments, private organizations, industry, business, and other interested persons.”
That hasn’t happened. FEMA/USFA is holding your data hostage.
But the gig’s up. The fear in Hall’s letter makes my eyes water. NFIRS isn’t working. The facts don’t lie:
NFIC’s Fourth Quarter Performance Report for Cooperative Year 2002, issued in May 2003, reveals the following distressful details: From 2001 to 2002, the number of fire departments reporting to NFIRS decreased from 12,153 to 7,880—a whopping 35-percent drop. The number of incidents reported fell in that time from 5,514,175 to 3,468,115—a 37-percent decrease. As of the time the report was issued, fewer than 4,000 fire departments had reported to NFIRS and fewer than 500,000 incidents had been captured for 2003, and uncorroborated projections estimate totals this year will be lower than 2002.
We’re going backward. And that’s why the apologists and spinmeisters are very, very scared. NFIRS 5.0 is a failure, a management debacle of large proportions.
What is the solution, going forward?
No one wants to see NFIRS go belly-up. But instead of blaming its potential collapse (Hall brought it up; I didn’t) on critics of the system, FEMA/USFA needs to clean up its act, bring some real leadership to the equation, and define a clear vision for what NFIRS should be. FEMA/USFA should be a clearinghouse for our data—nothing more, nothing less—a simple conduit that receives data and then moves them in timely fashion to people of various firematic interests who can and will actualize the data’s potential.
With our government having dropped the ball on the fire service, there is but one recourse: privatize data generating for fire service use.
One private company currently is generating NFIRS-based reports on a modest scale. Essential Data Solutions (EDS) is a not-for-profit entity established by FirePrograms, one of the two major fire software vendors to have survived the FEMA/USFA vendor purge of 2000/01. On a strictly voluntary basis, EDS offers both FirePrograms customers and noncustomers the opportunity to upload their NFIRS reports to its database. The information is then included in simple pie-chart reports, categorized by cause of ignition, type of incident, day of the week, and time of day, on a state or national basis, either for the year or segmented time periods. EDS has about one million incident reports in its database.
Some USFA and NFIC people despise EDS. In part, that’s because EDS is showing that computer professionals can paint timely fire department response pictures without much fuss. But in larger measure, it’s because Joe Zeigler, founder and president of FirePrograms, is by far the harshest critic of the NFIRS 5.0 insanity and, therefore, is the pariah among all USFA/NFIC pariahs.
And he has taken a serious beating from USFA/NFIC. Case in point: According to Zeigler, he received a threatening letter from the attorney for Electronic Data Systems, founded by Ross Perot, for trademark infringement (even though, as it turns out, Electronic Data Systems is not the owner of the EDS trademark). The letter was sent to an unlisted postal address that Zeigler, for security reasons, divulged to one and only one source—the United States Fire Administration. Get the picture?
I don’t work for Joe Zeigler. I don’t take money from him. I’m not selling myself for advertising (never have, never will!). My only interest in FirePrograms is that fire departments get good products from that company—and even then, let the market decide. But I share something with Zeigler: We believe that the firefighters putting their lives on the line every day deserve to have timely data in their hands that they can use to advocate their cause of safety and effectiveness.
In fact, Zeigler appears to be the only person in America who’s trying to do something about this problem. The not-for-profit EDS is not publicly funded. It’s funded privately by Zeigler himself, with his own money. And he’s willing to hand it off to someone else, if that’s what it takes.
To me, EDS is an example of leveraging private sector know-how for the benefit of the fire service and the line firefighter. Sure, it can and should be expanded to great detail. Sure, we’re going to need some rules. But it’s a start. And it’s what makes me think there’s a ray of hope for turning fire department data into something useful and vital instead of locking it in a dusty basement in Emmitsburg.
So I say again to the FEMA/USFA/ NFIC/NFPA cartel: Do what you need to do with our NFIRS data. Generate five-year-old reports if that’s what grabs you. Just release the data to the private sector, for our firefighters’ sake.
FEMA/USFA: Tear down this wall!
