The Fire Service: Data Rich and Analysis Poor

Fire departments across the country are notorious data collectors! If an appliance starts a fire in a home their reports will indicate make, model, serial number, damage estimates, injuries, and any other information that can be collected. Likewise, a vehicle fire report prompts them for make, model, vehicle identification number (VIN), where the fire started in the vehicle, vehicle insurance information, and fire department response information on apparatus, staffing, response times, and more. Firefighters and Company Officer who gather the massive amounts of required information often wonder where all that information goes, and why. The patented answer is “we have to report it to the state who in turn reports it to the feds”. So local departments relentlessly gather all the information obtainable at every incident to generate a report which will be forwarded to the state agency responsible for fire reporting, who will compile reports from every participating fire department within the state and forward that mass of data to the United States Fire Administration (USFA). Now that that is clear, the question remains, why?
The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is administered by the National Fire Data Center (NFDC) within the USFA. The system has been around for forty-years and was a direct result of the 1973 National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control report, America Burning. The report led Congress to passage the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 which directed the USFA to develop uniform data reporting methods, gather and analyze the data to establish trends, and to assist state governments in reporting fire data. So local fire departments collect all that data because Congress told the USFA to gather it from state government? Yes, and state government asks its local fire department to participate in the collection of all that data on a voluntary or semi-voluntary basis.
Reporting is a requirement attached to the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program as well as several other grants. This requirement has prompted many departments who formerly did not participate in NFIRS to begin submitting in the grant rich environment post 9/11. Over 23,000 departments submit annually to NFIRS making it the world’s largest, national, annual database of fire incident information. The “big data” submitted to NFIRS represents over 23 million incidents last year which is believe to represent approximately 75% of actual incident responses.
While this may be telling my age, fire reporting was in triplicate using carbon paper when I first joined the fire department. The main advancements I have seen in the twenty-seven years of writing incident reports is the methods by which data can be reported. While paper copies of reports are still accepted from departments without the means to report electronically, computer submission is the norm. Additionally, later versions of NFIRS allowed for greater data entry beyond simple fire & casualty information making it more of an all hazards reporting system. Unfortunately, the USFA has repeatedly requested funding and the fire service has lobbied Congress on its behalf, so that upgrades can be made to the reporting software to allow for analysis in a timely manner that will benefit the fire service; thus far these requests have been denied. Currently, useable data is available from the NFIRS system one to two years after it is collected by the local departments. In fact, while researching this offering the statistics available on the USFA web site in 2014 were gathered in 2011. If that is the speed at which trends are identified, the value of the analysis will be suspect, as fire will have certainly moved on to newer trends in the past three years. The USFA freely admits it has at least a two year lag in publishing data analysis yet maintains its position that a goal of NFIRS is to highlight current and emerging trends.
The departments continue to gather the data even though they receive very little in return in the form of usable information from the NFDC. Understanding that the fire problem is for the most part specific to local communities, therefore, some Chief Officers needing to gain efficiency in operations and prevention programs have begun to perform their own data analysis to define trends within their jurisdiction. They are learning how to use the information that is input through various means such as computer aided dispatch software, vehicle tracking, and date entry to study fire cause in given areas of the community, potential arson issues, response times, and service demands. Additionally, efforts are currently underway at the local level to use more current software to share data with neighboring agencies within a region and at the state level to better identify trends or serial arsonist in an area. Firefighters, medics, and Company Officers are also realizing the value in the meticulous accumulation of report data; in the litigious society that has emerged, often these officers must rely on their reports to testify years after an incident and reports are subpoenaed on a daily basis for supporting litigation.
The delays and inability to identify current and emerging trends at the federal level, the lack of analysis at the state level, and a lack of understanding at the local level of the true value and how to analyze the huge mass of fire incident report data is why I believe the fire service is and will remain data rich and analysis poor!