NFPA Journal - Summer 2021 - 60

CONNECTING THE DOTS
We put smoke alarms all over the place
and didn't see any type of accomplishment. But once we drilled down to the
neighborhood level, found the top causes
of ignition and fire fatalities, we were
able to target that with a specific plan,
and we saw results.
I know you've only been fire chief
in Upper Darby Township since
September, but do you have a CRR
program there yet?
I've only been here for 189 days, but
we're in the process of putting together
a formal document, and once it's completed, we'll share it with the mayor,
chief administrative officer, emergency
management, police, and those other
agencies to see how we can work
together to mitigate any of the risks that
we identified during this process.
In Philadelphia you hired a consultant to help you with the data. Have
you done that in Upper Darby Township, or are you doing it yourself ?
I imagine a lot of smaller jurisdictions wouldn't have the funds to hire
outside help.
We didn't have to hire a consultant,
because we've been able to participate
in a pilot program with NFPA that gives
us access to a community risk assessment dashboard to help us get started
formalizing a community risk program.
The dashboard has provided really
high-quality data-the same type of
information we got from a major consultant group, but we can get it cheaper or
free by being a part of the pilot program.
We've also relied on NFPA 1300 to help
guide us through the process.
How have the standard and the
dashboard tool helped with the
community risk assessment process
in Upper Darby Township?
The standard provides you with a good
guide of where to start, what type of
data you want to look for, and then
how you bring it all together to start
writing your document. It breaks the
community data process into buckets
like demographics, education level, poverty level-all those things that you need
to know about your community-and
tells you how to put them in the proper

sequence to start putting together a
formal document.
The dashboard provides you with data
and helps you organize and visualize it.
It gives you these heat maps that show
where your different demographics are:
where older adults live, where children
live in poverty, the education level in the
community's impoverished neighborhoods, etc. And then you can take your
emergency response data and overlay
that on those maps, so you can see
trends like where the most fires occur.
The interesting part is, most of the time
you'll discover that the majority of fires
and emergency incidents are happening
in areas where you have your highest
social vulnerabilities.
Have you uncovered anything
eye-opening from analyzing Upper
Darby Township's data yet?
One surprising thing for me was how
many children are living in poverty.
You would think being in the suburbs
outside of Philadelphia that we wouldn't
have the same problems as the big
city, but the reality is we do. In some
cases, parents can't afford childcare, so
they leave their kids home alone and
that's when you can see fires increasing
or issues with trips and falls because
they're playing unattended. It just adds
more risk to your community.
What can you do with that information? A fire department can't exactly
solve the poverty problem, right?
No, but you can partner with other
agencies to address some of those issues.
You can explore how you can work with
them to help get resources for families,
to reduce that risk for the individual,
and improve your response.
For example, the local school district
worked with us to provide us some training on trauma-informed care-children
living in poverty can suffer abuse or other
experiences that cause them mental
trauma. One child they worked with, for
instance, would walk out of the classroom
whenever he heard sirens because it triggered some very negative memories and
experiences. So when you show up blaring
the siren, telling them to do this and that,
they might not react the way you expect.
How do you address those children when

you respond to an emergency? You have
to be careful in making assumptions.
Another good example is hoarding,
which is a problem in a lot of communities. That's not something you would
think the fire department would address,
but by working and partnering with the
health department to get information
about hoarding to our firefighters, we can
be ready to address this with residents if
we go into these homes, and that might
go a little way towards moving them to
get some help.
It sounds like CRR can't just stop at
the fire department. You've got to
really engage and involve the other
agencies in your community.
Yeah, that's a very important component.
What are the other agencies that you
can partner with to get things done?
We don't have all the resources. A lot of
departments are strapped for funding,
especially when you're talking about a
combination department or a volunteer
department. If you don't partner with
these other agencies, you're not going to
be able to mitigate a lot of these risks.
Do you have any parting words of
wisdom for fire chiefs or departments
just starting down the CRR path?
You don't have to do it by yourself. You
should start out by asking, 'Who can I
partner with to help?' Look within your
community and your organization. You
have a planning department that can do
some of that work. There are colleges
and universities that you can partner
with that are willing to take on projects.
You've got a lot of master's students
who are often willing to do some of that
research for you or the assessment piece,
putting the data together for you as a
project for school so they can graduate.
And look within your organization to
see what skill sets people have. There
are a lot of people in the fire department
with skill sets we don't tap into-we
have a lot of younger firefighters who
come into the department with numerous skills. Maybe they can put together
data or spreadsheets. And take a look at
NFPA 1300 and the dashboard-NFPA
1300 has all the steps there for you.
JESSE ROMAN is associate editor at NFPA Journal.

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