Lock the Barn Door

I am sharing this email that I sent to fire prevention professionals this past week. I believe that the message needs to be heard loud and clear. It's time for us to wake up. People need to realize that they are responsible for their safety.

By the time fire departments arrive at your home when it is burning you are dead if you've not planned ahead, exited the home or at the very least protected your family with working alarms to warn you of the danger. Of course, people reading this will likely be the choir to whom I am preaching.

People need to stop trying to put out their own fires. Fire service personnel in the U.S. need to realize that we are already responding to a loss every time we go. When a family has a fire -- we are only mitigating a problem that has already happened. Why are we not doing a better job at teaching people how to prevent these problems from happening in the first place?

I have updated a few things from the original message.

In the State of Ohio we have now realized 137 fire fatalities for the year.

I’m sending this one for your info and consideration. It is a few years old (2007), but I have read this many times and often I still get very frustrated by the content. There are so many ways to prevent fires – and yet we as a service cater our budgets to the need for buying and staffing trucks. Firefighter safety is ABSOLUTELY important, but we also have ways to keep our firefighters safer, while allowing them to also be advocates for prevention. I feel this is a great read if you’ve never explored it.

The report Lock the Barn Door by Azarang (Ozzie) Mirkhah, P.E., EFO, CBO, also goes hand in hand with the FEMA/USFA document “Fire Death Rate Trends” produced by Phil Schaenman and TriData back in the mid-90s. The data is a bit old, but the mentality exists:

“…the United States, while having substantially reduced its fire death rate, is still 30 percent to 50 percent higher than its peer nations…”
“Other countries place a higher premium on their ability to prevent fires rather than their ability to put them out once they occur.”

I find that fire prevention educators still have a conflicted mindset on this, as well. They are often also suppression firefighters (and we LOVE to fight the fire). But they often miss the point. Prevention means fewer lives lost or injured, fewer properties destroyed or damaged. Saying, “I can’t convince these fire chiefs; their minds are made up; they can only fund staffing issues, not prevention” isn’t good enough. We’ve raised the white flag and are ineffective in our mission when we do this.

“Americans tend to view fires as an inevitable part of life and, unlike citizens in other countries, are more prone to characterize fires as unfortunate ‘accidents’.”

Please read the report when you can. And thanks for spending the time on this lengthy email. If you have arrived at this point of the text, I know you cared enough to receive the message.

Ways to reduce fire losses and deaths are neither unknown nor arcane. The primary way and the goal of any effort in this area must be to prevent fires in the first place. – America Burning Re-commissioned (2000)