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.