By Michele Steinberg
Many more wildfire incidents – brush, grass and forest fires – are reported throughout the U.S. than ever make it to a newspaper headline or video footage on a Twitter feed. The casual media consumer would never realize that the nation’s local fire service – some 30,000 departments strong – responds to wildfires on the order of 900 per day in an average year (source: Brush, Grass and Forest Fires, NFPA, 2013).
With nearly a quarter of annual calls involving a brush, grass or forest fire, the local fire service keeps very busy with wildfire response. However, more than half of local fire departments say that their personnel are not all trained to cope with the special challenges of wildland and WUI fires, and many struggle with acquiring and maintaining specialized equipment for wildfire response (source: Third Needs Assessment of the U.S. Fire Service, NFPA, 2011.) While large fires with massive deployments of federal agency firefighting resources capture media attention, these are only a small fraction of the wildfire incidents to which the fire service must respond. For example, NIFC’s report on the 2014 wildland fire season revealed that hotshot crews responded to 112 incidents, out of a total of 63,000 fires that year (source: National Interagency Fire Center, 2015).
A recent study by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) sought to learn more about the experience of local fire departments, who are typically the initial responders to an average of more than 330,000 brush, grass or forest fires each year (source: Brush, Grass and Forest Fires, NFPA, 2013). The report, Wildland/Urban Interface: Fire Department Wildfire Preparedness and Readiness Capabilities (NFPA, 2015), covers the first phase of a series of extensive interviews with 46 fire chiefs and senior line officers whose departments count wildfire response among their responsibilities.
NFPA, a global non-profit devoted to eliminating death, injury, property and economic loss due to fire, electrical and related hazards, supports the development, adoption, and enforcement of codes and standards, including those related to firefighting and firefighter safety. Its Fire Analysis & Research Division supports the fire community by providing reports and statistics on the loss of life and property from fires. The division produces dozens of reports each year on the overall fire problem, firefighter fatalities and injuries in the United States, major fire causes, fire protection systems, and more.
What we know — Needs Assessment of the Fire Service
At the request of Congress, NFPA partnered with the U.S. Fire Administration and its parent agencies to develop the first Needs Assessment of the Fire Service in 2001, published in 2002. This report and its follow-up surveys in 2005, 2010 and 2015 looked at:
- personnel and their capabilities, including staffing, training, certification, and wellness/fitness;
- facilities and apparatus;
- personal protective equipment;
- fire prevention and code enforcement;
- the ability to handle unusually challenging incidents; and
- communications and new technologies.
The intent is to identify the needs of the fire service for resources required to safely and effectively carry out their responsibilities. The surveys indicated the resources fire departments possessed, while NFPA codes and standards and other national guidance documents defined the requirements. The gaps between resources in hand and resources required defined the needs. (See http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/the-fire-service/administration/needs-assessment for more and for copies of the reports.)
From this series of Needs Assessment reports, NFPA was beginning to learn about the special challenges of local fire departments that respond to wildland fire. From its start in 2001, this survey included a few questions about wildland fire. Discovering that fully three-quarters of departments that said they responded to wildfire but lacked adequate training for all personnel was eye-opening. While that proportion has dropped to 52% in the latest survey (2015), additional NFPA research told the story of the significance of local fire department response to wildfires.
Using data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS), the world’s largest, national, annual database of fire incident information, NFPA analysts studied incident reports from brush, grass and forest fires – the three incident types the system uses to describe what many would term “wildfire.” The results were jarring. Nearly one in four fires reported to a local fire department in a typical year (from 2007-2011) fell into this category. While the majority (76%) of these fires stayed small, burning less than an acre, the sheer number of incidents provides a very different picture of the impact on local fire departments.
NFPA’s analysis also showed that local response to wildfires skewed heavily away from Western states, which was later reinforced by US Forest Service studies of NFIRS data showing that 70% of wildfires happen outside the western US. (Source: Short, Karen C. 2015. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.3). When one considers that federal lands are largely in the West and that fires on those lands are first responded to by federal agencies, this analysis makes sense. These glimpses into the size and distribution of the wildfire problem and the needs of municipal and rural fire departments prompted NFPA to conduct a qualitative study of U.S. fire departments coping with wildfire response.
The purpose of NFPA’s WUI Fire Department Study was to identify the most important elements in a local wildland fire protection program, including both response and community risk reduction. The study also sought to describe how fire departments overcome barriers and adapt to risk given the resources available to them. Hylton Haynes of NFPA’s Fire Analysis & Research Division led the effort, with collaboration and support from the IAFC Wildland Fire Committee, Sarah McCaffrey of the USFS Northern Research Station, Angela Garcia at Bentley University, and Rachel Madsen at Brandeis University.
The choice to take a qualitative approach to this study was deliberate. Given how little was known about local fire department experience in the wildland fire arena, a questionnaire approach was unlikely to capture the diversity and nuances of the challenges and approaches of the local fire service to the wildfire threat. An open-ended interview process was seen as more likely to yield rich results and a better understanding of the variety of needs of experienced fire service leaders coping with wildland fire.
The survey group included 46 fire chiefs or senior line officers, spread throughout the U.S., whose jurisdictions had experienced a wildland fire within the past one to five years. Twenty-six of the survey subjects were from rural jurisdictions (defined by NFPA 1142 as fewer than 500 people per square mile), with the other 20 from urban jurisdictions. The methodology included a 19-question pre-survey questionnaire with close-ended questions to provide a framework with some quantitative information. The survey itself consisted of one-hour recorded interviews accomplished either in person or on the phone. The interviews produced more than 1,150 pages of audio transcription over the more than 46 hours of recording. From this substantial and rich material, NFPA produced its “phase 1” report, Wildland/Urban Interface: Fire Department Wildfire Preparedness and Readiness Capabilities in 2015. This report used the findings gleaned from 25 of the 46 interviews.
Key findings of the study demonstrated the pragmatism of fire departments with responsibilities for both wildland and structural fire, as well as the challenges for departments in terms of training, communication and fitness levels.
- A number of departments made thoughtful choices about apparatus that could be used for a variety of purposes (for example, the Type 3 ‘hybrid’ engine), and about strategic dispatching to maximize the effectiveness of available resources.
- When communicating with the public, all departments reported to use traditional methods. Departments differed in their use of social media; this may be a missed opportunity for some.
- Nearly all of the interviewees spoke to the positive effect that community risk reduction efforts can have on mitigating the risks of major wildfire events and preventing the loss of homes and property should a fire occur.
Several problems regarding Wildland and WUI Fire training were identified, including:
- The need to transition from traditional training practices which emphasized structural fire training.
- Inconsistent adoption of Wildland/WUI fire training, with local and regional variations in the level and adequacy of training.
- Firefighter fitness levels that may not always be adequate for the rigors of Wildland/WUI fire events.
What do we need to do next?
These common themes help direct NFPA and others who work with the fire service on future research and potential programs or services that may help address needs and gaps. However, across these diverse jurisdictions, there was also a diversity in experience, particularly with the issue of working with residents on wildfire risk reduction.
In general, interviewees considered increased awareness and acceptance of fire risk in residential areas to be one of the first necessary steps in community risk reduction. While most reported that they believe residents in their local wildland/urban interface communities are aware of the fire risk in the area, they tended to be less confident that residents were knowledgeable or proactive about preventing and mitigating fire around their properties.
In approaching how to work with communities, some fire departments found significant cultural barriers to mitigation efforts. Many surveyed were eager for their department to partner with homeowners to help manage vegetation in residential areas, but some were encountering resistance by residents in the form of distrust of government, and a general lack of understanding of the importance of wildfire mitigation practices. In other areas, the more that agencies do to conduct mitigation work, the more they find that residents become reliant on them to provide fire prevention and mitigation services rather than take action on their own.
Cultural barriers in implementing community risk reduction and mitigation efforts are evident among fire department staff as well as among property owners. Interviews revealed the observation that the culture of the fire department itself can have a negative impact on the staff’s engagement with the community and their enthusiasm in carrying out fuel reduction and vegetation management projects.
Many interviewees felt that the overall culture needed to change to view community risk reduction as a cooperative effort rather than placing the responsibility solely on the department or on the homeowners.
While funding restraints and pushback against regulation appear to limit the capacity of local fire departments in implementing community risk reduction, the majority of interviewees found that the publicly available range of programs – from the Ready, Set Go! template for fire departments to Firewise to Fire Adapted Communities – were all valuable tools that assisted the efforts in engaging local residents. In spite of any cultural resistance internal to fire departments, the captains and chiefs interviewed place great value on both homeowner and fire department staff involvement in mitigation activities.
Finally, while not every fire department embraced collaborative approaches to wildland fire risk management, the ones who put high value on relationship-building were proud to share their accomplishments. They embrace collaboration and networks such as the Fire Adapted Communities (FAC) Learning Network, and the ability to participate in wildfire-themed conferences and forums. Through these venues, they have been able to share lessons learned, identify best practices, and address common challenges.
NFPA will be developing its Phase 2 report based on the remaining 21 fire officer interviews, to be published August 2016. Building upon the first report, analysts will further identify lessons learned and the currently observed “best practices”, and continue to identify motivators and barriers to change. NFPA staff wish to further explore the question of how fire departments prioritize when making changes to improve their wildfire response and mitigation capacity. The second phase of the study will also allow for further exploration of the differences from small to large jurisdictions, across rural and urban areas, and among paid, volunteer and combination departments.
While the second phase of the report is pending, NFPA has already used the initial findings to inform the development of its fourth Needs Assessment survey, completed earlier this year, and is providing the Fire Protection Research Foundation and wildfire-affiliated NFPA Technical Committees with information to help shape future research and inform the codes and standards development process. Visit http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics and choose “Outdoor Fires” to read or download the full report as well as the NFIRS analysis, Brush, Grass and Forest Fires.
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Michele Steinberg has served as manager of NFPA’s wildland fire operations since 2014. Prior to that position, she led the Firewise Communities/USA® Recognition Program, which includes more than 1,200 communities across the U.S., and encourages local solutions for safety by involving homeowners in taking individual responsibility for preparing their homes from the risk of wildfire.
