How many firefighters should a community have? How many should your community have? Despite a 300-year history of fire protection in this country, there's no clear-cut answer to that question. But there are people who have attempted to resolve that question by establishing a series of “magic numbers” that are somewhat illusionary at best.

Now before you get upset at me saying that the numbers are no good, let me qualify that statement. What I mean by illusionary is that they're not the same for everybody, everywhere, every time. The process that an agency goes through to determine the number of firefighters needed on staff to accomplish a specific performance objective consists of evaluating a lot of individual factors. However, there doesn't seem to be a magic number that can always be applied to resolve the question in the minds of policy-makers.

Consider this example. I've seen many staff reports that reference the ratio of one firefighter to 1,000 citizens. Says who? It's the International City/County Management Association, which publishes a yearly report that often compares the number of firefighters to populations. However, there's a caveat to that number. It doesn't apply to every fire department, and it's an average. In addition, that ratio has been declining over the years and therefore can't be a permanent baseline or benchmark for the measurement of fire protection.

Moreover, if you realized that it's virtually impossible to hire just one firefighter to provide 24/7 coverage, then you also know that unless you have three firefighters, you don't even have the beginnings of a fire agency. Let's take a small community of 1,000 citizens. If, according to the ICMA report, the requirement is to have a certain number of firefighters on duty per thousand, today you would have to find 8/10 of a firefighter to hire them. Without discussing whether that 8/10 represents physical or mental capacity, it's virtually impossible to have 8/10 of an individual.

I doubt very seriously that there are many communities in the United States that have a population of 1,000 and a full-time person involved in fire protection. Communities of that size can't afford it. For us to evaluate how many people it takes to support a firefighter per capita, we have to discuss how much money it takes to support that individual.

That's another magic number: per capita fire cost. Generally, this is expressed in terms of the dollar cost per person in a community to support the fire agency. It's often derived by taking the total budget of a firefighting agency and dividing it by the number of people it takes to raise that kind of money. Notably, there's no direct connection between the number of people and the amount of dollars because the funding to provide for fire protection is often a unique combination of property tax, sales tax, general funds, special assessments, grants and more. Nonetheless, there have been studies that demonstrate that similar fire departments have the same per capita fire cost. On the other hand, you often can find neighboring fire departments that have totally different per capita fire costs — picture back-to-back full-time, combination and volunteer departments. In each case, the per capita fire cost is a direct reflection of the community's economic ability to provide for fire protection in the first place.

In the origins of many fire departments, this phenomenon is best represented by the decision to hire that very first full-time firefighter. If the relationship between per capita fire costs, the number of firefighters per thousand is to mean anything, it has to be related to community expectation and anticipated outcome. Talking about the number of firefighters per thousand without discussing the outcome is somewhat akin to saying that one person makes a football team. Community expectations when you begin to develop a full-time staff in a fire department must be coupled with the idea that all things can't be accomplished with minimum staffing levels.

For example, if you're going to put a sufficient number of firefighters on the fireground to comply with federal law and state safety regulations, you have to put four people on the fireground. That is the absolute bare minimum on initial attack. Of course, these four people aren't the total amount of staffing required to deal adequately with a well-involved single-family dwelling, they are merely the safety requirement for an initial-attack fire company.

With such staffing requirements, it's pretty difficult for communities of fewer than 15,000 to ever be able to put a sufficient number of people on duty to provide a full-time firefighting force. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but such places are relatively rare. Most departments go through a stage of being a combination department when they are less than 15,000 population. This places a significant number of people on duty but relies almost entirely on the use of reserves and/or volunteers.

So how many reserves should you have per population? Nobody wants to address that question because those departments that use reserve forces frankly need to recruit a minimum of four individuals to have one show up on a regular basis. The Insurance Services Office recognized that a long time ago. And while they would give credit for actual response records, the fact is that combination departments that rely extensively on reserves don't have a magic number.

The upshot of all these magic numbers is that very few communities of fewer than 20,000 people, especially those that have normal proper-use distribution with a focus on residential occupancies, can afford a four-person engine company on duty. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try, but the per capita fire cost could be higher than that of a neighboring community. It's a policy choice.

Ready for some more magic numbers? Exactly how many people should a single fire resource protect, and exactly how much territory should it cover? Once again, the developing methodology of the fire service has developed a couple numbers. The first of these is a 1H-mile driving distance, a standard formula that has been used by the ISO for many years. Another magic number is the four- or five-minute travel time as described by those working with standards of cover as advocated by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. Both of these numbers estimate area to be protected and have nothing to do with property loss. In fact, several studies indicate that response time has very little bearing on loss of life and property. The variable that's most important is what stage the fire is in prior to notification. So what's so magic about these numbers?

The answer is probability. The ISO and CFAI determined these numbers based on several assumptions that we know to be reasonably true. The first is how long it takes for a person to cease being a viable, survivable patient after losing airway breathing and circulation. Individuals who aren't resuscitated properly are unlikely to come out of the hospital. The second is our use of the standard time-temperature curve to indicate what happens at a fire once it has gone to open flame. Here a distinction must be made. Although no sane fire chief will predict that every fire will flashover, this is often the “science” that's characterized in public presentations on why four-minute travel times are important. The real issue is where the fire is on the time-temperature curve when the alarm is transmitted.

If we consider all of these magic numbers together — firefighters per 1,000, per capita fire cost, 1H travel distance and four-minute travel time — we can determine the potential outcome of a fire in a community. Arriving with too few people too late to any event creates the probability of a loss. That's the basic premise behind fire station location: Stations should be distributed so that a significant number of firefighters are notified of a fire before it reaches open flame production and can arrive on scene prior to flashover. That's the complete story. Talking about any one of our magic numbers without recognizing the others often is the reason why public policy and analysis of fire station staffing and deployment are such raging public debates.

I'll bet many of you have been at city council meetings where uninformed testimony was given using anecdotal information about the lack of need for either instant response or adequate staffing on fire apparatus. I'm willing to bet there are stories that would raise the hair on the back of any fire chief's neck. Yet that phenomenon will continue as long as people believe there's a magic number.

For example, just because a department has one firefighter per 1,000 citizens, does that mean it will have effective fireground operations? No, it means that the level of spending required to support that particular position will then have a certain price tag.

Does a 1H-mile travel distance or a four-minute travel time ensure that 100% of fires will be controlled? No, but it increases the probability that the vast majority will be confined to the stage of fire growth that exists on arrival.

Do low per capita fire costs equal bad fire protection? Such under-funding may not have anything at all to do with actual efficiency. Does a high per capita fire cost guarantee that a department will perform well on the fireground? No, not unless the department has in place appropriate policies, strategies, tactics and practices — it could be an organization that's expensive but not necessarily effective.

All of these questions create a tremendous dilemma for both the professional fire service and the public policy-makers. We need to do everything we can to reduce that ambiguity so there will be fewer inconsistencies in how well fire protection is supported by all levels of government.

We need a lot more science in our policy. We need to eliminate magic numbers and replace them with verifiable data. That information needs to be tiered or structured in accordance with the other variables that exist in the fire protection community. There is a considerable amount of this information available on the databases of various organizations, yet academia has yet to really consider the American fire problem worthy of study.

Recently I was approached by a group of individuals working on a doctoral program for the fire service. In the course of our discussion, I asked them what hypotheses would be worthy of doctoral dissertations. They said that while a lot of fire service has been hailed as ground-breaking within our profession, it often has lacked academic discipline. The conclusions are sometimes flawed and sometimes easily discredited.

We can do better than that. Granted, it's going to take time, and it may take a little money. It also will take a great deal of cooperation and coordination.

We have failed miserably in the quest of establishing a national fire service database to really understand what the fire community is all about. What absolutely amazes me is that many businesses have come into existence in just the last 25 years but have tremendously surpassed the American fire service in terms of understanding both their customer base and economic indicators of their business. When people invest millions of dollars in a business, they don't want to be using magic numbers. They want to be using real ones.

And therein lies the challenge for the American fire service: Let's get real.

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.