In Florida, an estimated 20% of firefighters involved in structural firefighting lack formal training; in the state of New Mexico, 89% of firefighters serve in departments that have no program to maintain basic firefighter fitness and health; in Missouri, an estimated 66% of the fire trucks are at least 15 years old and an estimated 26% are at least 30 years old.

What are the estimates in your state? You can find out in state-level breakdowns of the National Fire Protection Association's national Fire Service Needs Assessment Survey, posted online last month in the NFPA's One-Stop Data Shop.

Commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Fire Administration, the NFPA’s comprehensive national survey of fire departments, first released in 2002, revealed that many departments lacked basic equipment and response capabilities and were severely underequipped for more challenging terrorism or hazmat incidents and major natural disasters.

The report, which NFPA President James Shannon called a “call to action,” provided convincing data to national policy makers of the need to increase federal resources for the nation’s fire departments.

“The biggest message was the original national study that we released a couple of years ago, which showed all kinds of needs for fire departments in order for them to do the jobs that their communities asked them to do,” said John R. Hall Jr., Ph.D., of the NFPA Fire Analysis and Research Division,” but we know that as former [U.S. House] Speaker Tip O’Neill used to say, ‘All politics is local.’ Many decision makers and policy makers have trouble relating to the numbers unless they’re brought closer to home. So we did the state reports to demonstrate what we suspected we’d find and in fact did find, which is that every one of the 50 states has significant needs for their fire service. We hoped that once they saw that it was true of their state and not just of the nation -- that they were not an exception -- that that would provide additional motivation for them to go in and do something about it.”

The state reports can be downloaded free in PDF format from the NFPA One-Stop Data Shop at www.nfpa.org. For printed copies of your state report, e-mail Nancy Schwartz at osds@nfpa.org or call 617-984-7450.