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.