A Fresh Look at Prevention
Risk reduction is the company officer’s responsibility—and opportunity
By Shannon Pieper

OK, let’s face it: Even if you give fire prevention the politically correct lip service, you probably don’t get too excited about it. And you probably don’t make it a priority in your day-to-day responsibilities. And maybe, even, you think that fire prevention is really someone else’s duty—you’ll do a few smoke-alarm checks or a school presentation when you have to, but it’s sure not what you signed up for.

Maybe it should have been. With budgets increasingly strapped, fire prevention, rather than mitigation, represents a growing area of concern for a lot of communities. Departments that do it well could actually be saving firefighter jobs.

Of course, to fully embrace fire prevention is going to take a cultural sea change in a lot of departments. To find out a little more about how this might work, I recently caught up with Mary Marchone, training specialist for the National Fire Academy’s Community Risk Reduction division, who taught today’s FRI seminar, “The Company Officer’s Role in Community Risk Reduction.”

A Skills Problem
Marchone has an unusual perspective on why fire prevention and risk mitigation get such a bad rap among firefighters. “Getting involved in prevention is a skill, just like laying hose and tying knots, but we haven’t practiced it with our firefighters,” she says. “When people come into the fire service, their training is really based around what we do when we’re faced with an emergency.” Those are the skills, she argues, that are enhanced and developed throughout the career of a firefighter—not skills such as building partnerships and getting out in the community.

“Our people aren’t really opposed to prevention, they just don’t have the skill level and confidence to go out and do it,” she says. “People who go into prevention and fire safety education are much more extroverted; they have no problem just walking up and talking to someone. I think firefighters and company officers are more comfortable with waiting to be called—and then they go and do whatever is necessary. But for them to start knocking on doors—for a lot of them that’s not really where their comfort level is.”

Further, Marchone knows from her own 30 years of experience as a fire safety educator with the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service that educators often don’t reach out to the firefighters themselves. “I sometimes regret that I didn’t spend more time in the stations, talking with the firefighters,” she says. “I’ve heard from those firefighters that I did talk to, many years later, that those presentations had a profound effect on them.”

Marchone’s message: It’s time to start building prevention, risk mitigation and community education skills in fire service personnel, and it starts with company officers. “We’re missing a broad base in the fire service by not targeting company officers, because they have tremendous social influence and responsibility,” she says.

Integrated Risk Management
In fact, the model for this approach already exists. It’s called “integrated risk management,” and it’s widely used in the UK—and increasingly in some communities in the states. “In the UK, firefighters are now known as ‘community firefighters,’” Marchone says. “They value suppression and prevention equally. Their focus is, ‘what can we do to make our community safer?’”

But what does integrated risk management look like in practice? Although it has yet to catch on here in the United States in a big way, Marchone points to some successes.

“One place that comes to mind is St. Paul, Minn., where the fire department has a long history of being active in the community,” she says. “The mayor has identified goals for the community, and the fire department has subsequently determined how they can play a role in the advancement of those goals.” So for the city goal, “Ready for School, Ready for Life,” the fire department works with children enrolled in early childhood education to teach fire safety; for the goal “Healthy Communities, Healthy Living,” the fire department has been involved with initiatives that increase physical activity.

Hagerstown, Md., is another place where the fire department is active in integrated risk management, conducting community home safety surveys. “Codes cover commercial occupancies, but single-family dwelling fires are where we lose a lot of people, and they also kill firefighters,” Marchone says.

Company Officers = Triple Threats
And as Marchone sees it, although everyone can play a role in prevention and mitigation, company officers carry the heaviest responsibility. “Company officers are ‘triple-threat players,’” she says. “We used to say that actors who could sing, dance and act were a triple-threat act. Our firefighters are 1) credible, with technical expertise; 2) trauma survivor advocates who can advocate for ways to make streets, homes and office buildings safer; and 3) trusted protectors in the community.”

This combination makes a prevention message coming from a company officer much stronger than from a fire safety officer. “They see the consequences firsthand, they’re responding 24/7/365, they save lives, they know the true costs and consequences,” Marchone says. “We have to capitalize on them because of the major influence they have on public perception and the likelihood that the public will hear their message.”

That’s why Marchone focused the new NFA class, “Leadership Strategies in Community Risk Reduction,” on company officers—because they’re the ones in the position to understand the risks to their communities. “If you’re in a department with 30 stations, what’s happening on the west side might not be what’s happening on the southwest side,” she says. “Each company needs to develop a profile for what going on within their jurisdiction. What are the leading risks—is it fire, drowning, pedestrian safety, natural disasters? What have we done to prepare that community for these types of risks?”

To be successful in this effort, Marchone notes, company officers not only need to build their individual skills, but the fire department must also become better at working with other community partners. “We need to strengthen their individual knowledge and skills, we need to get them involved in how you promote community education, how you involve those stakeholders, how you develop these programs,” she says. “And then, the fire department shouldn’t be developing programs in isolation. We need to reach out to the community. I don’t think we’ve been good about that. We sit in our offices rather than going out and tapping into key stakeholders.”

Finally, “Company officers also need to be looking at ways to internalize this,” Marchone says. “We lead by example. When company officers set an example that prevention is of value to them, that will transfer to their people.”

The Takeaway
When you leave her seminar, Marchone wants you to understand at least two takeaway messages, the first being that prevention isn’t an activity, it’s a process. “We associate it with dealing with kids, going to schools and teaching the public, but it’s so much more than that,” Marchone says. “We want to emphasize to our people that they have a responsibility to understand the community.”

The second takeaway: to recognize and mobilize the power of community. “What we’re talking about is coordinated and comprehensive—it needs to be an organized community effort, not just something the fire service does,” Marchone says.

Finally, Marchone points out that although firefighters have long thought that better prevention means fewer fire service jobs, that outlook may be shortsighted. “Look at the number of jobs that were created in this country that deal with prevention of something—preventing cruelty to animals, preventing diabetes or other diseases, etc.,” she says. “I think we can create jobs if we wrap our arms around prevention.”

So if prevention isn’t what you signed up for, maybe it’s also not as bad as you once thought.

Shannon Pieper is deputy editor for FireRescue magazine.

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