Two young firefighters were at a conference outside their district when their pagers sounded. There was a fire at a very large apartment complex and “they lost the whole atrium,” one firefighter said.

This got the instructor's attention so he asked the firefighters about the building, which they described as having an atrium with two large wings of apartments on either side of it. The instructor asked if those wings had been damaged and the firefighters said no. “Maybe you should not say that you lost the entire atrium but that you saved the east and west wing,” the instructor said. The firefighters hadn't thought of it that way.

Is reporting and thinking of loss and only loss ingrained in the fire service culture? It seems so. It's similar to seeing the glass as half full or half empty.

For example, fire departments are required to use National Fire Incident Reporting System. What is one thing NFIRS asks and what is one thing that they track? Loss. Page 19 of the NFIRS instruction manual states:

“G2- Estimated Dollar Loss and Values - All that is required is your estimate, not absolute precision. Insurance companies and property owners will get their own independent estimates of the loss, as necessary. These entries are intended for use by your department, your state and federal government to establish broad categories of dollar losses. Property owners and managers can help with estimates. These estimates are not intended to be legally binding in any way.”

Property- and contents-loss estimates are required for all fires, and it is a local option to use the two categories: pre-incident property value and pre-incident contents value.

There are several things wrong with this reporting system. It gets firefighters and officers only to think about loss. All the local residents hear is how much the fire department lost, and public officials see only these figures in various reports. Now we have the entire world community seeing the half-empty view of the fire department. No wonder budgets are being cut left and right.

Look closely at the instructions on how to report loss. They clearly state that it is only an estimate of loss and does not have to be accurate. Imagine what kind of numbers are being reported? The picture the fire service is paints may be more like the glass is three-quarters empty.

Another problem with this system is that reporting the pre-incident property and contents value is optional. Deducting an accurate loss statistic from an accurate pre-incident value would reflect what was saved. In most cases that figure will be larger than the loss, and it's that figure that the community and the public officials should know. This is the half-full philosophy.

Police departments continue to receive more funding in part because of the way they report their results. If a city had 1,121 violent-crime incidents in 2005 and 1,120 in 2006, the police would report that violent crime has gone down. The public will think that the police are worth the tax money spent and they provide a feeling of safety and security, the second tier on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In that same community, the fire department reports $1 million loss, and the community and the public officials have a totally opposite reaction.

One department has figured out how to use the half-full philosophy. The Greensboro (N.C.) Fire Department not only reports loss but shows the loss-to-save ratio. Last year, the department reported the total value of properties experiencing fire loss as $1.56 billion. The total property lost due to fire was $7.3 million. The percent of value saved was 99.53%. This is truly a half-full philosophy, perhaps even a three-quarters—full philosophy.

Isn't this better than just reporting that the property loss due to fire for that year was $7.3 million? Which reporting method gives the community and public officials that necessary feeling of safety and security? Which report statistics provide better support during budget negotiations?

Greensboro then takes these figures and breaks them down further to a per-capita figure. Using the same figures as above, the department determined that its budget costs each resident $161 in taxes. The property loss due to fire cost those same residents $31 each. Adding the insurance costs of $84 per capita, the total per capita cost of the fire department is $276. The per capita value of the property saved is $6,530. This translates in a return that amounts to 23.6 times the investment. Who wouldn't invest in something that returns 23.6 times the money put into it?

If a community member or a public official was given this report in a professional presentation with graphs and other illustrations, would this then get him or her to think that the fire department is worth the money and that it provides that all-important feeling of safety and security?

It is time that all fire departments think the way Greensboro does. In this age of needing to do more for less, fire department have to be innovative in the way they report their effectiveness. Fire department public-information officers need to report saved property, not loss. Fire officers need to orient their members to think in terms of property saved. This would give firefighters a greater sense of achievement, boost morale and instill more pride.

The young firefighters that were mentioned in the beginning of this article should not have said, “Man, they lost the whole atrium,” but “Wow, what a good stop. We saved the entire east and west wing.”

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Chief Mike Chiaramonte, CFO, is a 40-year member of the Lynbrook (N.Y.) Fire Department and its former chief. Chiaramonte is a past chairman and board member of the IAFC Volunteer and Combination Officers Section Board and past president of the IAFC Eastern Division. He's also a National Fire Academy Instructor and on the advisory board to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Chiaramonte is a state EMT-B. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Houston and a master's degree from Hofstra University, both in communications education.