Community Risk Reduction
More to come
Most of what a fire department responds to is predictable in aggregate, even when no single incident is. Community risk reduction is the work of finding the households, buildings and populations where the next one is most likely, acting before it happens, and measuring whether the action changed anything. The technology is mostly about joining data a department already holds to data it does not, and about keeping track of work that happens nowhere near an incident.
What technology needs to solve
We do not know which parts of our community are most at risk
Prevention effort is spread evenly across a jurisdiction where risk is not evenly spread, so the households most likely to have a fire are as likely to be missed as anybody else.
We cannot show whether our prevention work is doing anything
Home visits, alarm installs and education sessions are counted but never connected to an outcome, so the program survives or dies on budget politics rather than on evidence.
Inspections are behind, and we cannot tell which ones matter most
An inspection schedule built on a fixed cycle treats every occupancy as equally risky, so effort goes to buildings that were fine last year while the ones that changed hands or changed use wait their turn.
What good should look like
- Risk is described with local data, not a national average.
- Risk can be seen at the address and neighborhood level, not only citywide.
- Prevention work is recorded somewhere that survives the person doing it.
- Visits, inspections and campaigns are tracked to an outcome, not only to a count.
- Data shared with health, housing or social services is governed by a written agreement.
- Personal information collected during prevention work is protected as carefully as patient data.
- Measurement compares against a baseline taken before the program started.
- A program that cannot show an effect is allowed to be stopped.