Phil Schaenman has an interesting view of the nation's government. In an office overlooking Arlington National Cemetery and the Washington, D.C., skyline, his company, TriData, is analyzing the federal government. But TriData doesn't examine the decisions of Congress or the president like many of the other organizations based in this area do. TriData analyzes the government's numbers, primarily those concerning the fire service.

Over the past 25 years TriData has produced more landmark research studies than any other company in the United States, if not North America. Schaenman started TriData in 1981 to provide credible research and analysis for public safety and government. His previous position as associate U.S. fire administrator in charge of the National Fire Data Center and the Fire Technology Program gives him insight that has earned him a well-respected reputation in the nation's capital and across the country.

“When I was in the federal government, I spent 80% of my time on bureaucratic things and 20% on public interest. With TriData, I spend 80% of my time in the public interest and 20% on corporate interest,” Schaenman says.

For the past 15 years Schaenman's company has authored Fire in the United States for the USFA. Over the years, Fire Chief magazine has relied on TriData's research for the state of the fire and emergency services.

Broad reach

TriData is a fairly small company with 15 full-time employees. Another 50 consultants — fire chiefs and specialists located across the country — assist with local or regional projects. When TriData became a division of System Planning Corp. of Arlington, Va., a new level of depth was added to the company with a staff that has extensive system development expertise complemented by strong problem-solving and analytic skills.

Schaenman believes TriData is in a unique position to work with local governments and fire departments, as well as with federal agencies. This synergy allows for local insight on national level research and national insight on local- and county-level studies. To date, TriData has completed more than 130 studies of local fire departments, including 40 metro cities and counties.

“When you work with 150 different governments in depth and you do a study about what's feasible,” he says, “you have that synergy of what the British call the ‘sharp point.’ It's very unique that TriData can bring it to the local and national research.”

Schaenman believes in producing data that will stand over time. “It's not just collecting data, it's knowing how to analyze the data,” he says. “We show fire departments how to put it together graphically and how to interpret that information. That, I believe has permeated the whole fire service. Most of the fire service is collecting data that is flowing into the U.S. Fire Administration, and we're analyzing it for them.”

TriData was working on national security issues before Sept. 11, 2001, according to Schaenman, but after Sept. 11 there was a big surge in working with its parent company and the federal government. It's easier to ask Schaenman what industries his company doesn't work with than which ones it does.

“We have worked with almost every industry that has a product that starts fires. We have done studies on tobacco, candles, electricity, gas, home appliances, wood products; there's a long history of products that start fires,” he says. When Schaenman realized that Europeans were smoking more than Americans yet have lower fire death rates, he went to the tobacco industry to fund national research.

“Why is it that the United States has a higher death rate than anywhere else in the Western world, even though Europeans smoke more than we do?” he asks. “The results were so shocking that frankly I didn't believe what I was hearing. The report showed credible evidence that the emphasis that Europeans, Japanese and others in the Pacific Rim put on prevention is the reason for their lower fire death rate.”

Landmark studies

Of all the reports TriData has produced, Schaenman says that Fire in the United States has had the most impact: “That work is the statistical underpinning of prioritization of the whole fire service. The focus of fire departments changes as a result of that report.”

Collecting data from the fire service continues to be a difficult task, but Schaenman sees improvements. “There are lots of problems with [the National Fire Incident Reporting System], but we have a vastly better understanding of the fire problem because of NFIRS than we ever had before. We've helped the Fire Administration analyze that information and get it out to the fire service and publications.”

For a company its size, it's amazing they have produced so many landmark reports. International Concepts in Fire Protection is known around the world and is unmatched by any other study. More than 15,000 copies were distributed at no charge to major fire departments in the United States and abroad.

In fact, many of the TriData reports are available at no charge, particularly the federally funded reports. “We're not in the business of selling publications,” he says. “None of these reports are copyrighted. The whole point is to get the information to the public.”

Although it has been decreasing, until the Iron Curtain fell the United States had the highest fire death rate per capita in the Western world. Once the Soviet Union opened up, however, the former republics became much more candid about their fire death rates, which were much higher than the United States' ever were.

When asked about the high fire deaths in Russia, the chief of St. Petersburg “had a single-word answer,” Schaenman says. “‘Vodka.’ One of the little-known facts about fire deaths is that about half of all the adults who die in fires are drunk.… It's the fatal scenario. You fall asleep because you're intoxicated, not because you are smoking.”

Between 40%-60% of adults who die from fire were intoxicated, and some fraction of other fire fatalities are related because an intoxicated person may start a fire but isn't among those who died. The leading cause of fire deaths isn't smoking, it's smoking while drinking.

While visiting China, Schaenman found that the Chinese were incredulous to learn that the United States doesn't prosecute people who kill with fire. In China, when they investigate a fire, they put down the cause and who was responsible.

“They have degrees of responsibility and indirect responsibility,” he says. “If your kid was playing with a cigarette lighter that you left out, you are directly responsible. Sentences are attached to the level of responsibility if you kill or injure people.”

Prevention first

The differences between the United States and the rest of the world can be astounding. “Europeans and the Far East have said that prevention is their first service, not a support service,” Schaenman says. “I can't tell you how many organizational charts there are in the American fire service, but prevention is almost always listed as a support service. I think that's just plain wrong. It should be the first thing in your mission statement, as opposed to prevention being something to which you give lip service and show up at schools during fire prevention week.”

Two TriData reports, Overcoming Barriers to Public Education and Proving Public Education Works, revealed that Americans don't focus on fire prevention like other nations because people don't believe that public education works. To help improve the perception of public education, TriData set out to learn how to evaluate the pub-ed programs currently in use. The firm developed a methodology to evaluate public education; its conclusions now form a chapter of the NFPA handbook.

“We need to follow the lead of other nations and educate throughout the year and reinforce lessons at home and in industry,” says Schaenman. “That's why we cared so much about this report on proving that public education works because we have concrete evidence to show that it does.”

Culturally speaking, public education goes hand in hand with how a nation's people regard fire and its causes. “Do you put a bigger penalty on careless acts that kill or harm others through fire or hazardous materials? Our International Concepts report shows how other nations do it. The Japanese are not safer in prevention genetically, it comes with the culture,” he says.

“The U.S. Navy has proved you can do it with Americans. The Navy has one-third the fire death rate of the rest of society. They're protecting a million people in more dangerous environments and they have one-third the rate of death. They are educating more people, inspecting more, building in more safety, sprinklering more and it's all paying off.”

Greatest hits

TriData's work goes beyond public education. Schaenman has discussed the need to measure preparedness and emergency management at a local level with the Department of Homeland Security. “One of the key issues in homeland security and the reason that Congress rails against DHS is the quantitative measure of success. How do you measure preparedness? How do you measure local governments' preparedness when it gets so many million dollars in grants? We can and should be measuring that quantitatively.”

Another area TriData is working on is trying to measure fire protection effectiveness. Schaenman said the true measure of a fire department is loss averted: “You put the fire out, but what difference did you make? How far would the fire have gone if you didn't put it out? Did you have to knock down the door anyhow? Did you just increase demolition costs by not letting it burn?

“To answer that question, we have a very novel and straightforward approach we're using with the Navy. It's the first time anyone has tried to measure saves. When someone at one of the 60 installations in the Navy fire services puts out a fire and can argue how the fire would have spread if they didn't put it out, they send in a ‘saves’ report. The Navy fire services have paid for their own departments through the costs that they've saved. I think they are the first fire departments to show that, and I think the whole fire service should be doing this in an age when everyone has to prove their worth.”

A four-year study on wildland safety awareness was another of TriData's greatest hits. The study was sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fish & Wildlife Service, and Forest Service.

The Storm King Mountain multiple fire fatalities triggered the study on safety and firefighters' attitude toward it. TriData staff interviewed 300 firefighters with open-ended questions and then used that data to formulate a three-hour questionnaire for 1,500 firefighters. Half responded, and each one was judged valid.

“We got this extraordinary response and they poured their hearts out to us,” says Schaenman. They named names and said, ‘We lose situational awareness.… We get cocky.… Our immediate supervisors get carried away with the mission and don't focus on safety but only on getting the job done.’”

Over the next three years, safety was studied and changes made. For example, wildland firefighters used to work three weeks out in the field, but now it's two weeks because fatigue is a tremendous issue.

Trend watching

These studies and others put Schaenman in a unique position to look at where the fire service is going. He believes that what happens in the fire service is a function of major changes in the world.

“The world is changing. The fire service has evolved to an all-hazard agency emphasizing more than just fighting fires,” he says. “If there is a biological attack in this country, most likely the fire service is going to be running around with meters and working with the health department. The fire service is going to be shaped by what happens in the world.”

Global warming is another big-picture concern of his. “Is the fire service going to be the one to build the ark to carry people out of the city when flood comes? With global warming, not to mention hurricanes and changes in weather patterns and sea levels, the fire service's rescue capabilities may be pulled in 10 times more than they are now.”

Of course, the fire service can't ignore the march of technology. With the military working on how to fight wars using robots and artificial intelligence to put fewer people at risk, can the fire service be far behind? “Will we send robots into buildings to try to see the environment before the firefighter goes in as we now do with bombs and potential toxins in the atmosphere? How the technology evolves will affect how the firefighter's job changes.”

And the next generation of firefighters? “What's great about the younger firefighters is that they are growing up with amazing technological innovations.” New firefighters are prepared to integrate new technology into their jobs.

Fire chiefs will not be immune to changes, either. “It's hard to predict what the fire service will be doing, and because of that, the fire service needs to stay agile,” Schaenman says. “It needs to be adaptive. I think there will be a fire chief or emergency chief, but he or she will have to have an adaptive response.

“What the fire service is doing today is trying to learn the basics of a lot of different professions. We start out with fire and we add emergency medical service and hazardous materials on a small scale, and now we're adding chemical, biological and nuclear defenses as part of homeland security.”

In the end, Schaenman says that leadership is the key to making sense of all the changes ahead for the fire service. “The ability to adapt is pivotal to the fire service right now. Leadership needs to be adaptive in the face of a changing world. That includes leadership at a federal level, in the U.S. Fire Administration, DHS, and at the state and local level.

“In the fire service there will be strides in innovation, but it will happen a lot sooner if we have innovative leaders backed up by their cities,” he says. “We have better-educated fire chiefs these days, but they're under great constraints from their city management and budgets. The problem for a lot of leaders is being muzzled by local circumstances.

“The fire service has an incredibly important future and it needs to stay agile. We need agile leaders to keep tracking what's going on in spite of all the constraints of living in a big city or being a volunteer firefighter. Being an adaptive manager who can prepare for the different directions the world might go may help save some of our societies.”

FIRECHIEF.COM

To learn more about the U.S. Navy's fire prevention program, read “First Class” by Phil Schaenman on our Web site.