The saying goes that “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” I would submit that we could add a third: weapons of mass destruction. A leaner in a game of horseshoes might make the difference of who wins and who loses and a near miss with a hand grenade still can result in casualties. Even a proximity hit in weapons of mass destruction can be a success for the person who pulled the trigger.

What started me thinking about this was our concern about the line-of-duty death profile in the United States. Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the focus has shifted considerably. One idea that has gained our attention is the notion that reducing line-of-duty deaths in the fire service is a worthwhile goal. I find it hard to believe that anybody would disagree with that contention.

But, line-of-duty death has spawned another phenomenon — the Near-Miss Reporting System. That project did not emerge out of any specific fire death, but rather was taken from something the aviation industry has embraced for so long. That concept is simply that close calls will sometimes tell more about the next tragic accident than any other single event.

We have a severe if not monumental challenge to prevent line-of-duty deaths, and perhaps we should apply this same line of logic to the FVOA, the Fire Victims of America. We are approaching the end of a calendar year and will again publish the number of firefighters who died in the line of duty. Simultaneously, we will publish the number of victims who have succumbed to fires. My math may not be perfect, but I strongly suspect that the ratio is going to be about 30-to-1. In other words, out of about 100 firefighters deaths, there are some 3,000 to 3,500 civilians who fall victim to fire.

With complete deference to the work being done by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, where is the memorial for the fallen fire victims? They are scattered in locations throughout the United States, bronze plaques on stone cairns that describe the names of these obscure victims. I have seen some of them and have photographed them for my slide collection. There is one in Hinkley. There is one in Peshtigo. There could well be one in your neighborhood.

But, other than the continuous goal of America Burning and the perpetuation of fire prevention by fire prevention advocates, nobody really memorializes the loss of life that is some 30 times greater than the loss of life in combat. And the one big difference between our loses and the civilian losses is the idea that firefighters lose their lives from a variety of threats such as vehicular accidents, heart attacks, cancerous growths and other items. A fire victim falls as a result of two things: heat or smoke. Both are nasty ways to die.

I am not comparing one to the other. To the contrary, I am recognizing that while that ratio does exist, it is the manifestation of a level of commitment of the fire service. It is not a conflict between the two. Granted, I am convinced that if we could reduce the number of firefighter fatalities to a minimal number (and I dare anybody to tell me what that number is other than zero), we should also be able to reduce the loss of life to fire of those we protect to an absolute minimum (I am not sure what that number is, but zero is probably isn't achievable).

What this does point out, however, is that we are really not doing a very good job of analyzing the near misses with fire victims. Let's go back to the logic of why the Near-Miss Reporting System came into existence. There was a recognition that many tragic situations were a hair's breadth away in a previous incident located somewhere else. The concept of near-miss reporting is to learn as much as you possibly can from those incidents so that you can prevent that circumstance from occurring sometime in the future.

Nationally, we do not do an adequate job of thoroughly evaluating structure fires and the mitigation strategies that could be saving lives. Granted, we have the National Fire Information Reporting System. But it is a voluntary system that is totally inadequate when it comes representing 100% of the data that we could have available for policy developers to review.

What would happen if we were to create a piece of legislation that would mandate that every fire department provide a comprehensive report anytime there is a structure fire in which civilians were in the structure at the time of the event and either self-evacuated or were rescued, or there is a civilian injury or fatality.

This limitation would eliminate a number of structure fires from further description and analysis. We don't really care about fires in unoccupied buildings, unless someone went in there for the wrong reason and never came out. We've killed way too many firefighters in buildings that are unoccupied.

I want to learn the basic factors that determine the survivability of parties when fire occurs in occupied buildings. Granted, one can research many Web sites in the American fire service and find information on such things as the activation of smoke detectors, the discussion of the role of a residential sprinklers and the success of the operation life-safety program. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

When a structure fire occurs and people survive, we need to know a lot more than our current body of knowledge. For example, where is the information on the level of knowledge of those occupants? Did they do the right thing? Were they knowledgeable of the circumstances? What lead up to their ability to survive? If a fire were treated at the same level as a homicide, nobody would pack up their gear and go back home until all the facts that were brought into evidence had been clearly indicated.

It is a reality that most fire departments hate paperwork. What I am suggesting here is more paperwork. But, if I we're going to sacrifice anything in the development of this policy, I am not really too concerned about fires that occurred in buildings in which there was nobody there. Granted they might be important for purposes of tactics and strategy, but they don't have much to do with public policy.

Anytime there is an actual exposure to a fire inside of a building and people get out or don't get out of it, we need to know more. We need that level of information to go beyond point of origin and determination of cause. We need to explore everything from economic factors, educational factors, technological assessment and so forth. The American fire service knows very little about what is killing individuals, while it continues to add to the inventory of codes and ordinances trying to prevent that.

That is where we go back to the concept of the near-miss reporting system. Here is a question. If 3,500 people die every year as fire victims, how many more are fire injuries? I know that information exists in somebody's database but I never hear anybody talk about it. I am sure that the National Burn Foundation has some of that data, but where is it being used in local, regional or national policy discussions?

What about the collective impact of burn injuries and the long-term cost of care for burn victims? My suspicions are that it has a huge fiscal impact on our economy. Yet, it is as obscure as the number of those whose lives were saved by air bags.

Another criterion for this evaluation is that we need to know more about the conditions when firefighters are injured. I am not particularly concerned about additional effort in investigating fires in which firefighters are fatalities because there have been significant improvements in that arena. Driven by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and a strong support by the International Association of Fire Fighters and the International Association of Fire Chiefs, more and more attention is being attracted to the events in which firefighters are victims of fires. Let's look at the near misses in a stronger fashion.

Equally important are those incidents that result in debilitating injuries that force firefighters into early retirement and drive up the cost of providing the level of protection in a community. If we tally what is actually being paid out in the way of burn institutions and in retirement benefits, we might be surprised to find that this also is a huge fiscal impact.

I once characterized our nation's fire deaths as the crashing of a 747 jet on a monthly basis. If that were actually occurring, the aviation industry would throw everything it possibly could at eliminating that problem. The aviation industry has discovered that examining the near misses with pilots has a huge impact on the safety of the passengers.

In throwing horseshoes, getting anywhere near that steel stake is going to score a few points. However, hitting a ringer greatly increases the chances of winning the throw. If you throw enough hand grenades at your adversaries, you could slow them down but you may not always keep them from doing harm. Weapons of mass destruction are so nondiscriminatory in their consequence that their use often results in an unexpected consequence. The same can be said for trying to reduce the loss of Americans lives and property. We have to be able to hit that target more often than not. We can't come up with draconian measures that develop adversarial relationships and we can't follow a budgetary policy in which we demand that everything the fire service wants it gets. The answer is somewhere in between.

And, if we can't solve the problem on a national level, at an absolute minimum, we should be taking a much more focused approach on a local level. Ask yourself how thoroughly you are evaluating your near misses in structural-fire scenarios when people escape working fires. If you only had one last year you probably didn't have much to learn from. But if you are running on several hundred per year, you may be missing some of the lessons that we need to incorporate in future code changes and public-education messages. Those lessons need to be bundled up, carried forward to the region, the state and then hopefully emerge as justification for what we need to be doing in our national effort for fire and building codes. To do anything less, means we are not respecting the victims of fire by the same margin that we are respecting those who lose their lives in the quest for the elimination of fire loss.

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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.