Creating a five-year strategic plan for a single fire and emergency services organization is difficult at best; forecasting the entire fire and emergency services industry 50 years into the future borders on the impossible.

Here's an attempt to do the impossible, not by predicting the future but by understanding the past through analysis of performance during major and catastrophic events that our county has experienced during the beginning years of the 21st century.

Need for improvement

It doesn't take an in-depth review of national-level operations since Sept. 11, 2001, to see that we need a more robust system of response and recovery, and our government has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to do just that. These funds have been spent largely on terrorism preparedness and operational capabilities after a WMD event, yet the government can't provide the basic needs for affected populace.

The Civil Support Mission of the National Response Plan currently is the responsibility of the U.S. military. It's the effort and operations necessary to support state and local capabilities that have been overwhelmed by a particular event, but in reality the mission is divided into two distinct functions.

The first mission uses federal assets in technical responses to a biological, radiological or chemical event. The U.S. military clearly has a vested and proprietary interest in establishing, enhancing and maintaining this type of capability, and this is the primary reason for the creation of U.S. Northern Command, the Pentagon's “Homeland Defense” agency. Additionally, the National Guard Bureau has moved expeditiously to establish its 55 authorized Civil Support Teams; however, NGB has communicated with state and local governments that the chief purpose of these teams is to assist in a WMD event and very little else.

The second mission — more general and less glamorous — is the humanitarian relief after a major or catastrophic incident. Hurricane Katrina placed a spotlight on the need for this type of operational capability. This type of support isn't the primary mission of a combat machine and is a challenge for it to fulfill.

This leaves a significant void in the current state of preparedness to provide timely humanitarian aid after catastrophic events within our country — a void that will be filled by the fire service of the future.

New responsibilities

The fire service mission since its inception has been to save lives and property. There's no more logical group to be responsible for humanitarian missions than a community's fire service. How does anyone think that the federal government is more suited for this role? Time and time again this responsibility is abdicated to the federal government, only extending the time line for the response to these requirements.

The fire service of the future will have within its ranks not only individuals who are operationally and tactically proficient but who also are planners and logisticians. They will be responsible for creating the complex strategies and tactics necessary to provide for a displaced populace and for executing an efficient and effective supply chain in support of these requirements. Other responsibilities will include:

• Establishment of virtual warehousing that will serve as the points of distribution for life-sustaining commodities. These sites will be seamlessly communicating consumption and demand in real time back to the state and federal officials charged with keeping this critical supply pipeline flowing with requested commodities and assets.
• Development of field logistical support for the deployment of medical assets ranging from the establishment of mobile field hospitals to the distribution of the Strategic National Stockpile at predetermined sites.
• Management of emergency shelters and housing and of the populations occupying these resources. This includes registration and victim management.

The fire service of the future will mirror the current military model for support of combat operations but will focus on the civilian population. Today this type of civil support is largely volunteer, ad hoc, or simply cobbled together from other local resources and moved regionally or nationally by the federal government. The future will have a well-organized national capability within the fire service to meet this need.

But how will the fire service create this capability? There are two schools of thought on the subject, so scant progress has been made. My view of the future clearly supports strengthening state and local government. The other camp believes in strengthening the federal capability to overlay on top of or simply to take over the responsibilities of state and local government as the need arises. However, this answer doesn't build on the foundation and experience at the local level.

Service requirements

From my perspective, the U.S. fire service of the future looks much like the current Israeli system, which is locally driven and nationally augmented. Virtually all citizens have a military obligation of at least two years. While this obligation can be served in combat units, it also can be served in units such as the Home Front Command, which like FEMA responds to large-scale civilian disasters such as earthquakes and can quickly augment local capabilities.

Under such a program, individuals would belong to a national service cadre that's part of a new command of the military or a new entity of the Department of Homeland Security. The federal government would augment select state training academies to provide for the regional capabilities necessary to train inductees to national standards. Personnel then would be assigned to the fire and emergency services to support not only day-to-day operations, but to augment the civil support mission when needed. The system would not be a national fire and emergency service that supplants local and state responsibility but a nationally augmented fire and emergency service with qualified and trained personnel who perform national service in support of the civil support mission.

Over the years we have seen such federal programs try to take root. The 1973 Comprehensive Employee and Training Act program and 30 years later the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response program used or plan to use federal funding for the purpose of hiring additional firefighters and augmenting local capability. In most cases the funding is used to replace staffing of emergency equipment rather than adding capabilities.

Under the program of the future, communities will no longer be given funding; instead they will be provided with trained personnel and added national capability. There will be no incentive to use these resources to supplant local resources, as the individual's service requirement ends after two years and positioning and deployment of augmenting personnel depends on the probability of a threat.

The system would have thousands if not tens of thousands of nationally trained and equipped firefighters, paramedics, planners, logisticians and the like for assignment within urban areas and ready for regional deployment in the event of a large civil support mission. Assignments would be based on the probability of threat and would be regionally dispersed, reducing response times from days to hours without stripping away a community's core capabilities.

After the national service requirement is complete, individuals being discharged from service would provide a steady cadre of individuals with the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities to be hired into the career fire services anywhere in the country or enter into the volunteer service. An added benefit of this system would be the elimination of the basic fire and emergency training requirements in individual jurisdictions, freeing up funding for other priorities.

Cultural shift

Of course, the fire service of the future isn't compatible with the cultural norms of the fire service of today. The fire service of the future also will have experienced a major shift in its culture and attitude toward becoming a homogeneous service based on a uniform set of national standards requirements. The future fire service culture must be different and less parochial.

Experience with national-level operations has proved there are few skills that are jurisdictionally unique about the delivery of emergency service. Familiarity with territory, the infrastructure and the citizenry are useful, but firefighters and other public safety personnel are routinely assigned duties under the command of others outside their jurisdiction. We already have proved that the fire service is a portable national asset capable of its duties at any place at any time.

Yet as a service we continue to believe that the knowledge, skills and abilities developed in one place can't be used elsewhere. The fire service of the future will embrace the portability of knowledge, skills and abilities. Anything less is to face being relegated to a bit part in the greater task of securing the safety and well-being of our citizens.

As we look into the future, many of these new responsibilities resemble those of the emergency management community. The difference is in the execution of those responsibilities, and execution is the driving factor favoring the fire service's success. In the future, effective execution will be proportional to the magnitude of the event, with response assets deployed within a timely manner — something only the fire service has the historical culture and wherewithal to do.

Techno speak

How does technology fit into the fire service of the future? The rapid emergence of technology and the phenomenon of information half-life — half of what you know today will be useless in 20 years — make it almost impossible to make anything other than an wild guess about operational capabilities 50 years from now. Thermal satellite imagery and geo-positioning information combined with satellite communications that will immediately notify the closest response equipment will be the norm. The technology will be capable of determining if the equipment is traveling on the road or is in the station, eliminating the need for local fire detection equipment. I could go on, but you might see it all as a work of pure science fiction.

I had the opportunity to view technology that used radio-frequency identification developed specifically for the commercial transportation industry to expedite the vehicle-inspection process. The development company unfortunately has not focused efforts on a fire service application for their product.

However, if adapted for the fire service, this technology virtually could automate the apparatus inspection process and generate instant reporting of maintenance requests; manage drug kits by monitoring expiration of drugs and identify their location; and initiate electronic signature capture through the use of fingerprints. Given that vehicle accidents still account for a large portion of firefighter deaths annually, automating maintenance records would ensure an accurate inspection and serviceable conditions.

Also, it's through this RFID technology that I can envision the development of smart fire extinguishers and fire suppression systems that can transmit their status directly to an apparatus as it approaches a building or remotely update inspections record without manual entry by personnel. It also can be used in the installation of readers on overhead doors that automatically inventory the apparatus when it backs into the station, identifying and reordering disposable items that need replenished.

It's almost impossible to try to hit on what that latest and greatest thing may be 50 years from now when the next five years hold so much promise in the realm of technology. The fire service of 2057 will be an exciting place and as different from the fire service of 2007 as today's fire service is from that of 1957. Yet our future inarguably will be linked to our past and a common vision shared with the founding fathers of our service: the protection of lives and property.

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Ken Burris held several leadership positions in the fire services, including president of the Southeastern Association of Fire Chiefs and treasurer of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. He retired as the fire chief in Marietta, Ga., before becoming the first chief operating officer of the U.S. Fire Administration. Burris has served as the director of FEMA's Region IV and as the chief operating officer of FEMA. He currently is the vice president of government services for Stratix Corp., a supplier of mobile data-capture solutions in the commercial and government sectors.