As I watched the memorial service and saw the nine flag draped caskets of our brothers in Charleston, S.C., I started thinking about the legendary Francis Brannigan who said, “When a combustible structure is involved in fire, the building is the enemy, and you must know the enemy.” As you know, Brannigan also had a famous column, Know Your Enemy. It was a catchy title that was thought-provoking and effective at getting the firefighters to care about how a building's construction affected fire behavior and a building's response. But we need to take that even a step further.

The problem doesn't start with the building; it starts with the construction codes. The building is an object, not our enemy. Our real enemies are those who allow buildings to be built with little regard for the occupants' safety and even less regard for the firefighters' safety. It is time to face that enemy and change our construction codes to better protect the occupants and our own.

Investigators are still looking into the June 18 furniture store fire that killed nine Charleston firefighters. We do not yet have in-depth details or solid facts. However, some of the earliest reports mentioned multiple human errors and failures in housekeeping policies and procedures as factors that contributed to the ignition and the fast propagation of that fire, which eventually led to the catastrophic failure.

But those same human factors historically have been the roots of most commercial and residential fires, and major contributors to the magnitude of fire problem in our country. Take a look at the catastrophic multiple-fatality fires (three or more deaths per fire) that have occurred this year. Through the end of June, there were 247 total deaths in 60 fires. Of those fatalities, 142 (57%) were children.

And it is precisely because of these failure modes and human errors that it is imperative that this country uses all available passive and active fire protection technologies to reduce the risk and decrease the adverse consequences of failure.

Based on some of the contributing factors in the Charleston fire, Charleston Fire Chief Rusty Thomas might have been correct when he said, “Sprinklers would not have put out the fire but would have at least slowed it.” However, with sprinklers, at the very least, there would not have been a flashover and catastrophic structural failure; at least not with our brothers inside.

Remember that fire sprinklers do not prevent fires. They merely minimize the adverse consequences, once the fire has already ignited. That is why I believe so strongly in fire sprinklers; fires would be controlled and the catastrophic consequences would be much less.

I have written many articles about the great value of fire sprinklers. But, let me make it clear, that I strongly believe in the three Es of fire prevention: education, enforcement and engineering. Education is the most important because it focuses extensively on the three main contributors to the fire problem in our country: men, women and children. Human beings also happen to be the main benefactors of fire mitigations efforts. In his presentation at the 1947 President's Conference on Fire Prevention, NFPA's Percy Bugbee said, “Once every man, woman, and child realizes and accepts in daily life the responsibility for simple fire prevention measures, death, injury, and destruction by fire will be substantially reduced.” This clearly underscores the importance of public education in addressing our fire problem.

Enforcement is a carrots-and-sticks approach. In a sense, it reminds humans of the consequences of their failures and the associated liabilities. Engineering tries to decrease the risks, failure consequences, and damage by limiting the fire's growth and progression. Engineering is not only fire sprinklers, but also all available passive and active built-in fire protection technologies. However, the problem is that we in the fire service do not put as a high of a priority on fire prevention as we should.

In 1999, I did a research paper (“Fire Prevention in America at the Dawn of the New Millennium” (available at www.usfa.dhs.gov/pdf/efop/efo30302.pdf) for the Executive Fire Officer Program at the National Fire Academy. I surveyed 32 major metropolitan fire departments from across the country. Based on their budgeting and personnel statistics, I concluded that nationally an average of about 3.5% of a fire department's budget went toward fire prevention and about 3.8% of fire personnel worked in the fire prevention division.

If the statistics from thousands of cities with smaller departments and the little townships with volunteer fire departments had been incorporated into those calculations, the results likely would have been skewed even further down. And that, my friends, remains the reality of fire prevention in America today.

In the book Public Budgeting: Politics, Institutions, and Processes the idea of budgets is explained as, “Budgets are about values … budgeting is concerned with the translation of financial resources into human purposes. A budget then is a concrete expression of the values of society.” And, the book Public Administration in America advises that “Budgets also should reflect the mission or purpose for a bureaucratic agency's existence. This suggests still another function of budgets, intentional or not: they represent the priorities of those who formulated them.” Therefore, it is only fair to say that intentional or not, based on the available statistics, fire prevention is still not a high priority for our country's fire service.

We focus extensively on fire suppression and are always in reactive mode responding to fires. Until that paradigm changes, our ability to educate and enforce is very much limited. This is because there are not the resources to do the job that we all know could better address the fire problem in our country. It would make sense to focus more extensively on the other fire prevention parameter that we have some limited control over, and that is, engineering.

We must focus on the construction codes to provide for built-in passive and active fire protection technologies to reduce fire fatalities and fire loss. Based on the feasibility and availability of the current fire protection technology, automatic fire sprinkler systems present the most effective means of saving lives, both occupants and firefighters. Simply stated, at this time, they are the biggest bang for the buck.

The term “enemy” has a strong negative connotation. And this connotation might seem to contradict the importance of working with all of the building officials in the International Code Council and the builders in the National Association of Home Builders to cooperatively change the construction codes.

The word “enemy” does not exclusively mean prolonged antagonistic relationships. During the Cold War era, the United States considered the Soviet Union and China as its enemies. We were fully involved in an arms race. Yet we had a grain policy in the early 1970s with the Soviet Union in which we gave them wheat. And, we were involved with that nation in the intercontinental ballistic missile treaty negotiations, at the very same time. President Richard Nixon had the ping-pong diplomacy with China to gradually open them up. And just recently, U.S. diplomats have been involved in negotiations with North Korean regarding its nuclear weapons program. Negotiations don't mean that we have abandoned our principles and perspectives, but that we are pursuing our interests through diplomatic means.

Having an enemy, opponent, adversary, or whatever the label might be truly calls for more diplomacy and negotiations. I don't view our opponents as mortal enemies in a classical term; but as adversaries who we must defeat, using sound logic and science in the various code arenas.

With all due respect to our worthy adversaries in the code-development process, their delay in acknowledging the value of fire sprinklers in saving lives and property and embracing such technology for all new construction, by requiring them in the main body of their construction codes, is only prolonging the agony. They know quite well, especially after the Rochester ICC Final Code hearings earlier this year, that it is only a matter of time before fire sprinkler systems protect all newly constructed homes in America. Their delay is costly and causing thousands of civilians and firefighters lives to be lost every year.

But we should first look at ourselves before blaming others. Those in the fire service share that burden. And our low priority for fire prevention and our lack of strong participation in the code-development process are significant contributors to the magnitude of the fire problem in our country. Our own archaic views about the importance of fire prevention show that we are at times our own worst enemy. If we truly want to address the fire problem in the United States, then we must rearrange our priorities.

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Azarang (Ozzie) Mirkhah is a fire protection engineer with Las Vegas Fire & Rescue. A graduate of the Executive Fire Officer program at the National Fire Academy, Mirkhah has a bachelor's of science degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in public administration.