How do you know when you've added enough of an ingredient to some soup? How much seasoning do you have to add to get just the right taste? What happens if you put in too little? Too much?

In terms of your culinary skills, the answers don't mean much because it's all a matter of taste. But taste is the least of your concerns when talking about how much fire protection your community needs. In fact, a whole bunch of questions will bubble to the surface that are not only significant but are at the center of many of our discussions about public fire protection policy. What's the minimum size of a fire department? Is it possible for an organization to become so large that it no longer effectively delivers services? Can a fire department become so expensive to operate that it can no longer sustain itself without significant cuts?

These aren't idle questions. On the contrary, they're the basis of a discussion that's playing out in city council and fire district board meetings all over this country. The first fact that needs to be established in this discussion is the correlation between two factors in our communities with what type of fire protection we'll be able to provide. Those two variables are people and property.

I know it's an old joke, but how many of you have heard that there are three main causes of fire: men, women and children? Well, the reality is that the demand for fire protection services is almost always a function of population, unless you solely protect a wildland environment. Property, on the other hand, boils down to distance and access.

Let's take these variables and plop them on the old four-quadrant box that we've used for years in risk assessment: low to high population on the vertical axis; small to large area on the horizontal. The lower-left quadrant represents low population in a small area. The upper-left box is high population in a small areas. The lower-right quadrant would be low population over a large area, and the upper-right box would contain high population in a large area. The lines that separate the four quadrants represent thresholds. For example, if you have a fire department that serves a low population in a limited area, there's a possibility of migrating in either direction. You could end up with more people or a larger area.

There has been a lot of discussion about how we can best set some scientific parameters for what these four different scenarios represent. Yet in the development of those scenarios, none of those factors are actually talked about. For example, a house is a house is a house. If you have a single-family house in a remote area of Montana, it still would be a single-family house if it were plopped down in the center of Los Angeles. The real difference is the amount of money available to provide a level of service to that house — an amount that varies drastically depending on the funding mechanisms that are in place.

In numerous discussions about these factors, it's often noted that a large, wide-open area that is home to a very small population tends to be classified as rural. That's pretty obvious. You can fly over many parts of this country at night and see just a spot of light from time to time, several miles apart. Nobody will be able to respond to a fire alarm in a timely fashion, regardless of what the flashover curve looks like inside the building.

The opposite scenario crams a lot of people into a very small area, much like our urban service level. While it's tempting to think only in terms of cities in the United States, one of my initial observations of this phenomenon was in Hong Kong during the 1980s. They have taken the word density and given it a whole new definition. There is even some precedent for this scenario out of the history books. If you have ever studied the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D., it was really a case of overpopulation and substandard, high-density construction that resulted in devastation.

One scenario that isn't talked about nearly as much as it could be is a small number of people in a very small area, what I call “enclave” fire protection. This classic example of the crossroads of America fire protection occurs where a community has developed a small population base, possibly without any form of governance whatsoever. This is the origin of most of the volunteer fire service in this country. There's absolutely no requirement in most of the land-use policies of rural America to build a town around an already constructed fire station. The sequence of events is the exact opposite. People construct buildings, and nobody cares about fire protection until some event spawns their concern.

In examining these quadrants and trying to put some degree of logic behind everything, I have reviewed the physical attributes of literally hundreds of fire departments. In my study of some 500 of them over the last 20 years, I have noted that there are some dimensions of fire departments that tend to reproduce themselves over and over again. While I'm not willing to submit that these are benchmarks for fire protection, I will say that they are very definitely the leading indicators of why fire departments are the way they are. Pushing fire departments in the direction of effective performance almost always requires that certain attributes line up along the way.

We can start with a very simple premise: How far can a fire truck go if you send a fire truck somewhere? The answer is that it will go as far as it possibly can as long as it has a road to operate on and fuel in its tank. If we place a fire station at the center of this discussion, it's easy to see that as a community's road network extends from the fire station, there exists a very definite perimeter for how far a fire truck can respond in a reasonable amount of time. This reality is part of the science of distribution coverage.

What does this mean in the real world? Well, it's almost impossible for a fire station to cover more than 10 square miles and still have firefighters arrive at incidents within the time constraints that many of us consider appropriate for structural fire response. Therefore, if you have a fire station that protects more than 10 square miles, there are going to be lengthy response times.

Another attribute is financial stability. Fire departments are not free. They cost money, even volunteer fire departments. I know of no fire department that hasn't moved past the bucket brigades of the 1600s. To purchase a piece of fire equipment, whether used or new, requires someone to raise the money. Although volunteers may not be paid for their time, they still have to be protected with liability insurance and workers compensation. Full-time paid firefighters working in a fire station have a cost factor that is reasonably predictable and directly linked to policy decisions that determine how many people are on individual engine companies.

The combination of these financial factors leads us to the idea that there's a minimum amount of money needed to operate a volunteer or full-time fire company. Somewhere in between are combination fire companies that somehow emerge from the former and eventually disappear into the latter. Most volunteer fire departments will remain volunteer as long as their workload fits reasonably within the lifestyle of their volunteers. The minute you start asking them to go to more calls than they can fit within their existing commitments, they begin to disappear.

Because such an increase in calls is most often the result of an increase in population, we're left with the conclusion that almost all communities with fewer than 10,000 people, regardless of how much area is covered, rely predominately on volunteer or combination firefighting forces. Communities with more than 20,000 people almost never can sustain a volunteer force for a lengthy period of time without strong management and leadership.

The interplay of population and area creates a new collection of quadrants. The left axis depicts the population protected, from zero to more than 1 million, and the horizontal axis represents area, from 10 square miles to 100. If all 33,000 fire departments in the United States were plotted on this graph, we would see dots all over the place. This isn't the last word in level of service, however, because there's another variable to consider: value to be protected.

While people demand service, property is what's at risk. Therefore, the assessed valuation of a community is very often an indication of the community's ability to protect itself. Those communities that have an adequate tax base can afford a level of protection that may not be reflected by population and area alone. If you are fairly small and have a very low population, but you happen to live in a wealthy community, you may be able to afford something that someone down the street with exactly the same population and square mileage can't.

This may get a little tricky, but let's turn our four quadrants into a three-dimensional model by adding two more axes. On the vertical axis is assessed valuation, and on the horizontal axis is level of effort. Assessed valuation ranges from $1 million to more than $100 million, and level of effort ranges from $1 to $200.

Assessed valuation can be derived easily from assessor parcel information. Level of effort can be determined by looking at the amount of money that a community is willing to spend on its fire department on a per capita basis. Imagine two communities with an assessed valuation of $10 million each. In one community the residents decide to put $10 per capita into fire protection, and in the other they elect to contribute $100 per capita. You now have two different levels of service.

If we were to re-plot the nation's fire departments based on area, population, assessed valuation and level of effort, we would see a stratification of fire services that reflects the real world. In other words, this collection of axes is not so much a model as it is an expression of reality.

Now comes the tricky part, the balancing of too much and too little. We're entering the realm of public policy and the decisions made by those people who are elected to serve the interests of those being protected. At its simplest, the model works like this: If you have a lot to protect and you aren't willing to invest in fire protection, you might as well expect to loose some of it. If you're trying to protect everything and you can't afford it, you might as well expect to have system failure. The balance point is somewhere in between.

Despite the fact that people have been writing about fire protection for some 300 years, I have yet to run across anyone who has come up with a strong, accurate rule of thumb about how much is too much and how little is too little. However, I've been able to observe that communities with adequately funded fire departments have a better quality of life, as well as a better look and feel, than those with underfunded departments.

From a pragmatic point of view, I believe that most fire departments start off at one point before moving in a direction determined by the community. For example, you might start off with a low population in a very small area, but then your assessed valuation starts to increase and your per capita expenditures rise, taking you in a new direction. This is nothing more than the incremental decision-making process that could and should be part of land-use planning. Unfortunately, many fire departments and land-use planners might as well be living on different planets.

Modern fire protection requires two baselines or benchmarks. First, you need to collect developmental fees on increases in both population and area being protected for the very simple reason that fire trucks and firehouses don't grow on trees. They have to be bought with money that should come from those who benefit from that growth. Second, the ability to sustain a staffing level has to be planned and visualized over a period much longer than the annual budget. Long-range planning in the fire service isn't a widely accepted concept, yet it's essential to the success of any fire department that expects to remain viable.

To individual departments, I offer these simple questions:

• How much area do you protect?
• What is your population?
• What is your assessed valuation?
• What is your per capita fire effort today?

If you're on the low end of the population area and you have adequate funding to do your job, consider yourself lucky. If you find that you have a heck of a lot of responsibility and are barely able to make ends meet, you have my sympathy. In both cases the resolution of this particular issue resides in the hands of those who accept or reject our arguments for modern fire protection. Welcome to the real world of political advocacy.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.