How can anyone forget Robert DeNiro's famous line from the movie Taxi Driver? His expression of hostility toward someone who was presumptuous enough to tell him something remains a symbol of arrogance and indifference.

While there are some who like to use their DeNiro impersonation to minimize their need as leaders to listen, most of us want people to talk to us and tell us what we need to know so that we can avoid making errors in our own performance. Now here's an idea for you. What do you think would happen to the ability of a fire department to cope with an emergency if we could get buildings to talk to us?

Yes, you read that correctly. Whenever we pull up in front of a fully involved structure, the building often does talk to us. Many of you probably have taken classes on “how to read smoke.” One of the reasons why we study fire behavior at a basic recruit academy is to know the difference between ignition, flashover and backdraft. Buildings are already talking to us, except they're using sign language. It requires a certain degree of experience and expertise to really understand the signals.

But what if we could get that building to talk to us in plain English? Imagine if the instrumentation and telemetry inside a building could communicate to the outside of that building so emergency operations personnel wouldn't have to guess what was going on by interpreting the color of smoke, smells and odors emanating from that smoke, or faint glows at the end of hazy hallways. The technology to do that sort of thing is actually on the shelves today.

Built-in fire detection, alarm and suppression systems have the ability to collect information and transmit it digitally. Much of the information collected by building systems can be forwarded easily to a command center in a very complex occupancy. In some very sophisticated fire departments, this information is being transmitted directly to the fire alarm center. Not only can it be done, more importantly it needs to be done. And it needs to be taken to an entirely new level at some time in the future — the building needs to talk directly to the responding fire companies.

Back in the 1980s I wrote “Fire Service 2001” for American Fire Journal, postulating that it would be conceivable for fire alarm systems to be programmed to communicate the heat, smoke and flame conditions in a building to a remote computer. We have swept past that capability so rapidly that many in the fire service have failed to realize it's there to take advantage of.

We already are in a wireless era that allows us to transmit information from our fire alarm centers to our fire trucks. How much more difficult would it be to take that one step further? How about having the building communicate with a computer through wireless technology?

The more facts available to an incident commander, the more likely appropriate decisions will be made to render the situation harmless. One of the biggest issues in the fire service today is that of firefighter safety. It is no longer “cool” to risk a firefighter's life just to save a piece of property. Granted, there are fire service philosophers on both sides of this issue, but for the most part firefighter safety is placed at the same level of priority as occupant safety.

So what is to be done? We all recognize that there are various levels of built-in fire protection in our communities' structures. The vast majority of single-family dwellings have a very low level of technology installed to help the fire service. Most are limited to smoke detectors, and in some more advanced communities they have residential sprinklers. But large and complex buildings have a ton of built-in fire protection, and those that don't, like the old supermarket down the street, could be retrofitted with this new technology.

Between the latest and greatest in building technology and the old supermarket that predates modern codes are the calculated-risk buildings. These were built fairly recently and include a lot of technology, such as alarm systems, smoke detection, heat detection, built-in sprinklers, standpipes, electrical generators, exit lighting and more. It's this last group of buildings that I believe has the greatest potential for making firefighting safer and more effective.

Visualize if you will what would happen if we were able to develop a wireless interface between a sprinkler system and a computer that would tell us the system status. In the good old days when you pulled up in front of a building and heard the loud clanging of an exterior bell, you knew water was being discharged somewhere — you just had to find that discharge. What would happen if telemetry could tell us which zone and for that matter which sprinkler head was being discharged?

How many of us have gone out on an alarm that's affectionately referred to as a “smells and bells” call? Once again, there's nothing to guide us as to where the smell is coming from or where the bells are ringing except on the building's exterior. But if there were telemetry available to tell us what the smoke opacity was in specific building compartments while simultaneously showing which zone or which specific device had been activated, we would be in a much better situation.

Let's take this concept one step further. What if the first-in officer could pull up in front of the building with this information and a floor plan of that structure on the on-board computer, all of which is duplicated on the incident commander's screen as he or she arrives on the scene? If telemetry were linked with an appropriate interface, it's conceivable that the building itself could give you a size-up so specific that you wouldn't have to worry about the excess use of personnel just searching for the source of ignition.

Of course, discussions of this type raise some other questions. Are there any negative consequences from relying on this kind of information? Who would benefit? How costly would this kind of technology be? Who is going to pay for it? I don't have good answers on the cost factor myself, but I do know that as microelectronics continue to be developed and instrumentation is microengineered, the cost is decreasing almost daily.

I think there are many benefits to be derived from such technology. Most professional firefighters recognized early on in their careers that the earlier we receive detection and warning of an event, the more likely we are to prevent that fire from going to flashover. Quite frankly, all of the argument and debate over response time — whether it be four minutes or five minutes — is based on the fact that we don't have a clue when most fires actually start. We are basing the response-time criteria of the entire fire service on the bet that most fires have gone to open flame production by the time somebody finally notices them and calls for us to get there. Therefore, the greatest benefit to be accrued from this kind of technology is giving the fire service a fighting chance to actually save a piece of property, the tax revenue it generates and the lives that may be at risk.

The insurance industry could certainly benefit from this. The idea that we could arrive on scene and do something about calculated risk is bound to have an impact on the loss of property and in turn on insurance rates. With such benefits to be derived from installing this technology in the first place, we quite possibly could double or triple the effectiveness of this technology if the responding fire service has access to this information.

In terms of firefighter safety, if the building can talk to us then we are likely to be able to talk to the building. It's conceivable that this technology could lead to the ability to perform certain functions without endangering firefighters' lives, such as opening and closing doors, containing smoke spread, and performing certain types of ventilation activities.

This all may sound a bit like science fiction, but when I referred to it in 1980 it was really considered far out. Today the technology is available to do all of this. It may well be that in the next decade we will have incident commanders pulling up in front of a building, activating an 800 number or an IP address and, in effect, inviting the building to start talking with that command post. When that happens it's no longer science fiction.

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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.