One of the contemporary fire service's primary concerns is to match our response resources with our community problems, so that our resources can adequately resolve them. Much of this concern has been focused on the vulnerability of buildings, from the risk hazard and value evaluation system, also known as RHAVE, to databases and mapping techniques. Buildings, their contents and other improvements are the basic values that fire departments have tried to protect through fire suppression.

What makes many buildings vulnerable to fire are the acts and omissions of the people who occupy them. Most fire department mission statements start off with “to save lives and property,” not the other way around. But in the past the fire service has focused on buildings as the primary way of identifying risks, hazards and values because they're so easily measurable. We have avoided looking at the human factors in risk assessment except as anecdotes. Now that many fire agencies are more involved in responding to medical emergencies, they are turning their attention toward the people in the equation.

The fire service is fighting fewer and fewer structure fires per thousand buildings than it did perhaps 100 years ago. It doesn't take much more than reviewing building code and fire code provisions to find one of the reasons why.

Sometime in the 1950s, the emphasis on built-in fire protection increased significantly. Since then, concepts that had evolved within the building and fire codes have done a great deal to reduce the risk of fire spread. Now when a fire occurs, it's much more likely to completely destroy the building. Sprinklers now exist in the buildings that replaced those razed during last century's urban renewal. Redevelopment agencies have upgraded a lot of non-conforming buildings, too.

My friend Charlie Rule used to say that every building that ever burned down was burned down according to some code. It's often true that the risk and severity of fire are more often due to how old a building is rather than any other factor. In other words, how a building was constructed depends on what the codes allowed at the time, and how the fire service deals with entry, ventilation and interior attack is a function of technology and regulation at the time of a fire.

In contrast to buildings, social vulnerability deals with part of the emergency services formula that's harder to measure or even discuss openly. Remember the old saying that the three main causes of fire are men, women and children? Fire is not the only element driving the use of risk assessment to predict resource needs — sometimes response is about people.

Fire as a driving element of the fire service's workload has been diminished as many fire departments enter the EMS arena. It's common for many fire agencies to respond to as many as seven to eight medical calls for every fire event. This raises the question: What are we really planning for? The theory of risk management tells us that high-frequency, low-consequence events like medical calls have a dramatic impact on the day-to-day operations of most fire agencies. People are creating this demand, not buildings.

It might be useful to examine the social side of the fire problem to see if there are any elements that should be considered regarding fire department deployment. A word of caution, however: The discussion of social vulnerability may introduce some politically unacceptable arguments. It's very important for practitioners of this type of analysis to abstain from any consideration that social vulnerability is related to causation. The purpose behind reviewing demographics is to look at the potential for call frequency and severity, not to fix blame for what prompted the call in the first place.

How much do you know about the census information for your community? The census, while out of date most of the time, is still one of the most fundamental means to describe a community's social stratification. While no single social or economic stratum is more important than another, this information can help fire agencies identify where potential calls for service might originate and what they may entail.

Census data will reveal the following factors about a community: population, ages, number of males and females, number of people in a household, number of single-parent households, annual household income, ethnic background, language spoken in the home, vocation, and level of education.

The census shows that communities have as many similarities as they do differences. For example, in studying fire departments, I have found that some communities have a much larger population of senior citizens. It doesn't take a quantum leap to hypothesize that senior citizens probably will place a higher demand on EMS than middle-aged folks would. Of course, this supposition would need to be proved by a community's data, but in general, an analysis of social vulnerability would reveal a hierarchy of factors that can illuminate the nature of a fire department's service problem.

Take something as simple as the number of people per home. If a district has 1,000 homes and the census says that the average family contains 2.87 people, then it's reasonable to expect that there will be 2,870 people in that area. An examination of the district's response data might show the average number of calls generated by a population of 1,000 people is 65. For planning purposes, project those same 2,870 people as equaling 2.8. With the factor of 65 responses per 1,000 residents, it would be reasonable to expect that the social factors in that particular neighborhood would generate 182 emergency events per year.

What if a new housing complex is built in that same area? A high-rise, low-rent apartment house that adds another 1,000 people to the population would seem to increase the workload by an additional 65 calls just for that one building. But maybe not, as that scenario puts projections on some trickier ground. What if you had two identical neighborhoods with 1,000 homes each, but one set of homes has a median assessed value of $750,000 and the other has a median of $85,000? Would you expect there to be some differences in the social vulnerability between these two neighborhoods?

Don't be too quick to assume that lower-income people have more risk than their well-off counterparts. However, the only way to determine if there's any difference is to recognize that the difference exists. An examination of the frequency, location and nature of calls will help determine that the social vulnerability in rich neighborhoods is not the same as it is in moderate- or low-income neighborhoods. Without labeling these as being good, bad or indifferent, demographic factors do play into the combination of fire department workload and call frequency.

Another interesting demographic element is the cluster effect, which occurs when you have a particular occupancy that requires a particular type of call on a fairly frequent basis. We all know these exist. As a matter of fact, many fire departments love to share anecdotes about their frequent-fliers program. It's common to find that nursing homes, mental institutions, homeless shelters, and other homeless-people magnets like bus depots and train stations frequently require a community's emergency services.

The social vulnerability question in this case would be to look at why these people are placing such a demand on the services. Frankly, there isn't a lot we can do to teach these people how to be a customer, and they can't be regulated out of existence. Understanding where they are and what they're doing there can open up a dialogue regarding funding and the deployment of resources to cope with the problem. Many politicians would like to think that problems of this nature will simply go away if they aren't discussed. But these problems won't go away for a modern fire department. They'll continue to fester until something is done to reconcile them with resource allocation.

Another social vulnerability factor is crime. Most fire departments do not pay enough attention to crime statistics as they relate to demand in the response system. Granted, firefighters called to the scene of a gang shooting or domestic assault can't ignore what's in front of them, but this factor of social vulnerability should be considered during the planning process. The lessons learned from these events might influence the training of our EMS personnel or enhance security by improving relationships with law enforcement.

Social vulnerability is behaviorally driven and every bit as important to the fire department planning process as the structural conditions in a response area. Preplanning of fires requires a look at building construction and fire behavior to establish a heads-up on what to expect with individual occupancies. In the same way, social vulnerability looks at the culture of a community in relationship to the contributing factors that cause people to place demands on the fire service. Social vulnerability should be part of EMS preplanning.

Preplanning with social vulnerability requires extrapolation: the use of information beyond its present state to identify future trends and patterns. This technique can be used to project patterns of distribution and concentration of risk for the emergency medical services. The danger is that attempting to examine social vulnerability can rub some people the wrong way, especially groups that are very sensitive to any implication of being singled out. While this unintended result is something to avoid, it shouldn't dissuade fire chiefs from looking at information that's a matter of public record.

Once an analysis is completed, decision-makers need to identify options and alternatives. From time to time, the effects of any actions need to be reviewed to determine if any strategies should be revised. This is the one area where the fire service is weak. We do not have very much information on firefighting outcomes, nor do we place much emphasis on reviewing EMS outcomes internally. Many fire agencies let that data reside in the EMS community.

Social vulnerability also may be an area where we need to be targeting public-education efforts, injury prevention programs and other community-based health programs instead of adding additional response resources. If we truly want to reduce the loss of life from emergency medical incidents, we should tear a page out of the fire prevention textbook and begin to manage the risk as discretely and as specifically as possible.

One tool that could help fire agencies get a better handle on the issue of social structure in their communities is called Community Tapestry. A product of Environmental Systems Research Institute's work in the field of Geographic Information Systems, the Community Tapestry software builds upon the census information. It provides a portrait of 65 different U.S. consumer markets, divided into 12 “LifeMode” groups. These groups are further divided into 11 different “Urbanization” groups. Descriptions are provided for each subgroup so that distinct patterns can be derived from the information within each category. While this methodology isn't used as frequently by fire agencies as it is by other planners in local government, it could shed a lot of light on community lifestyles and help define the propensity for certain types of demands on emergency services. For more information, visit www.esri.com.

This discussion of social vulnerability may raise more questions than it answers. For example, if response time is truly the only parameter to measure success in saving lives and property, what is meant by “saving”? The fire service often looks at property loss and deaths as a byproduct of emergency response, but it seldom comes up with any assessment of what could have made the difference to the victims. If risk assessment is to be meaningful to the outcomes of response, the fire service ought to be able to measure its successes, not its failures.

Looking at the social vulnerability of our communities' residents and addressing all of the ways we can protect them and their property may be the ultimate in customer service.

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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.