About three-quarters of all fire deaths are in the home. For the last three years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and TriData have teamed to look at other nations' approaches to reducing residential fire deaths and injuries.

There were many good ideas, and most can be implemented within existing budgets. Many of these approaches have resulted in 40% to 50% reductions in fire deaths. Reducing fires and fire severity also reduces exposures to hazards that kill and injure firefighters.

One country researchers looked at was Canada. Local city or regional fire services provide fire protection. Researchers met with fire officials in Vancouver, Toronto, and the Ontario cities of Brampton, Waterloo, Ottawa and Surrey; and from the Ontario Fire Marshal's Office and the British Columbia Fire Commissioner's office. They also received inputs via phone calls and e-mails from many other Canadian cities and provinces.

Many of the best practices in Canada already are used in the United States, though often not on the same scale, and without the same impact.

Cultural Change

There is a sea change underway in the fire service culture of Canada to emphasize prevention and to establish a public mindset of taking collective and personal responsibility for safety.

More personal responsibility. Some provinces are working to get citizens to recognize fire risks, understand that many of these risks are preventable and assume personal responsibility to take recommended preventive measures. Ontario now has a zero-tolerance philosophy toward property owners and tenants who do not install or maintain smoke alarms on each story. Not complying with smoke alarm requirements can result in a fine of $235. In instances involving death or significant injury, fines go up to $50,000 for individuals and to $100,000 for corporations, along with a potential jail sentence of up to one year.

Staff dedication. The Ontario Fire Act of 1997 mandates that prevention activities be part of the everyday function of the fire service. As a result, more firefighter time is spent on residential fire-safety and school programs than before. Several Ontario fire departments use line firefighters to do home visits where they check smoke alarms and provide fire-safety information one to one.

Prevention Strategies

A common theme in successful prevention strategies is taking a comprehensive approach that includes good data for targeting and evaluation; partnerships to leverage resources; and multiple coordinated programs.

Comprehensive data. Ontario requires fire departments to report all fires, and departments report at close to 100%. Data is systematically analyzed by cause, population group, geographic area and age group, to identify and prioritize risks and to evaluate prevention programs, which are more likely to be successful if based on good data.

Targeted high-risk groups. Minority groups, the elderly and people with disabilities are at higher risk than the general population and receive targeted programs.

Multiple coordinated programs. Prevention programs that use multiple, coordinated approaches and capitalize on partnerships with other government agencies and the private sector are more likely to be successful on a large scale. They have more outreach, more repetition, and more consistent messages.

Private-sector donations. Many costly prevention programs are being implemented without tapping fire department budgets by soliciting funding from private industry. To ensure fairness, some fire organizations issue a request for proposals for sponsorship of programs, just as they do for contract services.

Impact-based program goals and evaluations. Fire departments in Canada aim to reach much more of a city's population than do most U.S. prevention programs. Goals often are stated as reaching all schoolchildren in specific grades, or all households over a time period (e.g., five years). They measure success in terms of outreach, change in knowledge, change in behaviors, and change in fires, deaths, and injuries. Examples of their metrics include the percent of households visited, the percent of population reached with cooking-safety messages, the average score of schoolchildren on safety exams, and the percent of households with working smoke alarms and completed escape plans. In the United States many programs are measured in terms of the number of people reached, which is less informative than the percent of people or households reached. Reaching 1,000 elderly with safety messages is high outreach if the elderly population is 1,200 and less good if it is 20,000.

Required risk assessments. Ontario and Quebec require all fire departments to file a risk-assessment plan with the province. Ontario fire departments must complete a municipal fire protection information survey.

Specific Programs

Some of the best specific practices we found are summarized below. Most successful prevention programs use several of these approaches.

Home visits. Door-to-door canvassing by fire departments is a crucial strategy for reducing residential fire deaths. Many Canadian fire departments now do home visits on a large scale. Typically the plan is to visit all households over a specified period of time (e.g., five years), with the highest-risk areas visited first.

During home visits, pairs of firefighters inform residents of the legal requirements for smoke alarms, the need to test and maintain them, ways to prevent common fires and the importance of having an escape plan. Some departments install alarms or batteries if needed. Most leave safety literature if no one is home and invite the occupants to request another visit when convenient. Data is collected on each household visited as to its level of risk and mitigation measures taken. In Longueil, Quebec, population 400,000, the fire department visited all 152,000 households with pairs of firefighters over a four-year period. Each fire company shift was given addresses to visit in its district. First priority was the oldest homes and homes in high-risk areas. Fire deaths dropped by 50%, to 3.8 deaths per million.

Ottawa firefighters visit high-risk homes to ensure they have at least one working smoke alarm. Fire service personnel test alarms, replace batteries as needed, and install an alarm if none is present. Volunteers are paid to make home visits at the same rates as for responding to calls. The homeowner is required to get any additional working alarms needed to comply within 10 days, or face a fine. After this program was implemented, the percent of homes without working alarms dropped from 39% to 15% in three years.

Brampton, Ontario, checks smoke alarms during EMS calls to homes as well as during door-to-door visits. Many EMS calls involve the elderly and disadvantaged, and this approach helps reach high-risk households.

Partnerships

Canadian fire services make excellent use of partnerships to increase outreach of messages, identify high-risk homes, and obtain funds for campaigns and safety villages. This leverages the limited resources available for prevention.

City departments. Many cities train local social services such as visiting nurses, meals on wheels and social workers on how to test smoke alarms, look for hazards and provide fire-safety information when they visit homes. The agency personnel contact the fire department to follow up on fire-safety problems found if they are not readily solved. This gains entry to some of the highest-risk households that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

Private industry and wealthy donors. Major companies provide goods, services or money for prevention, e.g., Kidde Canada discounts smoke alarms; Co-operators Insurance provides money for smoke alarms; Canada Tire allows use of store parking lots in 310 locations for fire-safety demonstrations; Wal-Mart provides money to buy Risk Watch; Duracell provides batteries for home visits; CTV and Global TV donate spot time and produce spots.

In the Schools

School programs in Canada tend to reach a larger percenage of schoolchildren than those in the United States. Fire departments work to reduce barriers and provide incentives to facilitate school participation. One fire department provides refreshments for teachers during their lunch periods while a fire-prevention officer explains the program. Teachers and school administrators are put on fire-safety curriculum development committees to help blend programs with the main school curriculum.

Safety centers. A strategy to increase outreach and improve quality of fire-safety programs is to bring classes to safety centers instead of doing the training in classrooms. Waterloo Region's fire and police services teamed to develop and staff a Children's Safety Village that includes realistic-looking, but scaled down buildings; streets with intersections, parking and sidewalks; and a railroad crossing. The village has an educational center where classes in second, fourth and sixth grades attend fire-safety lessons. The children first watch and discuss a fire-safety film. They then have safety lessons further explained using a “hazard house” (like a large doll house). Finally the children go to full-size mockups of rooms to identify and discuss safety issues and practice safety skills.

Brampton's Fire and Life-Safety Center is a centrally located building that houses the public-education staff and contains mock-up rooms for teaching fire safety. Students in first through fourth grades visit the center each year. The curriculum is designed with input from teachers. The ability to bring classes to the public educators dramatically increases the number of students who can be taught by a small prevention staff. It also provides a much better teaching environment than a typical classroom.

High-school interns. Brampton and Waterloo expand their public-education resources with high-school interns to provide instruction at the safety centers or during school visits. Interns receive community service credits needed for graduation.

Homework. Following class sessions, many school fire-safety programs reinforce messages by giving students exercises to do with their families, such as testing smoke alarms and making an escape plan. Some programs send home a survey for parents asking if their children brought home safety ideas, and the parents' perception of the program. Teachers who bring classes to the safety village are asked to evaluate the experience.

Elderly and Special Needs

Most Canadian cities have safety programs for the elderly, often a Canadianized version of NFPA's “Remembering When” program or the Ontario Fire Marshal “Older and Wiser” program. Besides making home safety visits, Toronto has three key approaches:

• Training care providers to check on fire safety when they visit homes of the elderly.
• Transporting homebound elderly to safety presentations.
• Distributing a safety calendar to seniors, to help remind them of basic safety practices for seniors, throughout the year.

Immigrants and Ethnic Groups

Most Canadian cities have tailored fire-safety programs for their growing immigrant and ethnic populations.

Community "ambassadors." Ottawa uses volunteers active in their ethnic community to go door-to-door with firefighters during home visits. They supplement firefighter staffing for the home visits, help firefighters gain access into households by showing a familiar face, and translate if necessary.

Native councils. In some Native Canadian cultures the tribal council plays a major role in safety issues, so the fire department provides safety information for the council to pass on, instead of approaching individual tribal members directly.

Inner-city bus ads. Because high-risk populations often use buses, Ottawa purchases smoke alarm ads on inner-city routes.

Ethnic media. Many fire departments put fire-safety messages in local ethnic newspapers, radio and television stations to reach specific groups.

English classes. Fire departments in Ontario partner with English as a Second Language (ESL) schools to provide basic home fire-safety information to new Canadians taking these classes.

Firefighters with language skills. Vancouver maintains a list of firefighters who speak a language other than English. They assist with interpretation of educational materials and giving presentations.

Translated, simplified public-education materials. Brampton, Ottawa, Toronto, and Windsor have simplified public-education materials translated into the major second languages prevalent in their region.

Partnerships with immigrant associations. The Office of the Fire Marshal in Ontario gets assistance from the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants to present prevention materials to frontline workers through their settlement services.

General Population

Most cities, and some provinces, have fire-safety campaigns throughout the year.

Budget for TV and radio ads. Many Canadian provinces and cities have budgets for buying air time for fire-safety messages, typically 15- or 30-second advertisements during popular programs. They do not depend on free, late-night public service announcements that often miss the majority of their target audiences. The air-time budgets are augmented by industry donations and TV station discounts.

Subsidized fire-safety literature. The Public Fire Safety Council, established under Ontario law, is empowered to raise funds from private organizations to develop fire-safety campaign materials. The council subsidizes sale of NFPA and other materials to the fire service, giving them a 75% discount that results in much wider use of the materials.

Media events and news conferences. Provincial fire marshals and fire chiefs hold media events and news conferences focused on safety issues such as unattended cooking, drinking and smoking, and alarm maintenance, and to announce the latest safety statistics. Some of these media events are held in fire stations.

Innovative dissemination venues. Ottawa firefighters hand out home safety brochures in supermarkets and grocery stores, and use parking lots of businesses that sell smoke alarms for safety demonstrations. Ottawa also makes presentations in on-campus residences.

Featured fire station. While citizens can visit any fire station, Brampton steers them to a particular fire station whose firefighters are handpicked for their ability to provide safety education. This enhances the likelihood that information will be properly communicated and memorable.

Cooking safety trailer. Unattended cooking is the leading cause of residential fires. In partnership with Coldwell Banker Realty and the Kitchener Fire Department, Waterloo built a trailer to dramatically demonstrate with live fire how cooking with oil can be dangerous if left unattended, and what happens if one attempts to put out the fire with water. The trailer is taken to many venues, and provides an unforgettable demonstration.

Firefighter union-sponsored campaigns. The British Columbia Professional Firefighters Burn Fund has developed large-scale, burn-awareness campaigns including poster contests that involve two-thirds of the schools in the province.

"Superboarding." Vacant homes in Surrey, B.C., are boarded up extra securely to reduce arson. Ontario Fire Code requires that vacant homes must be secured against entry — and they enforce it.

Fire crew messages. Ontario firefighters are expected to be the first point of contact with the public. Fire trucks are equipped with a set of 24 message cards that address the most common fire safety issues, which helps crews give impromptu presentations in the field with consistent and correct messages.

Sprinklers

The ultimate long-term solution to most of the residential fire problem is the installation of sprinkers in all residences. A 1990 Vancouver bylaw requires sprinklers in all new residential units and in all residences remodeled at 50% or more of their cost. By 2009 almost half of all Vancouver residences were sprinklered and residential fire deaths decreased dramatically. Damage to non-sprinklered homes was 13 times higher than for equivalent sprinklered homes over a 10-year period. More than 20 other jurisdictions in British Columbia, including some with volunteer and combination fire departments, also require residential sprinklers.

National, state and local fire agencies should consider the rich array of ideas found in this global research on best practices. There are many innovative prevention programs that are associated with significant decreases in residential fires and fire casualties that are likely to have similar effect if we use them. There also are new ways to increase outreach and impact of conventional programs. All in all, there is little doubt that major savings are possible in life and property loss if American fire departments use the best ideas from other Western cultures.

Philip Schaenman has been researching international concepts in fire protection for the last 30 years. He started this work while associate administrator of the U.S. Fire Administration in charge of the National Fire Data Center and Fire Technology program in 1976-1981. He continued the research after founding TriData in 1981. Schaenman also has undertaken extensive fire risk analysis and research on various other aspects of fire prevention. He oversees the USFA's annual statistical report "Fire in the United States."

For More Info

For more details on best global practices in residential fire safety, download the following reports free of charge at www.sysplan.com/tridata/publications/international.

Global Concepts In Residential Fire Safety, Part 1 - Best Practices from England, Scotland, Sweden, and Norway, TriData Division, SPC, October 2007.

Global Concepts In Residential Fire Safety, Part 2 - Best Practices from Australia, New Zealand and Japan, TriData Division, SPC, August 2008.

Global Concepts in Residential Fire Safety, Part 3 - Best Practices from Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Dominican Republic, TriData Division, SPC, June 2009.

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