Fire & EMS Leader Pro The job of old firefighters is to teach young firefighters how to become old firefighters!
By: Robert Avsec, Executive Fire Officer
Pick up almost any fire service trade journal or visit most industry websites and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: leaders in the U.S. fire service are telling us that a “new normal” emerged from the Great Recession of 2008. What I find far less often, however, is a serious discussion about what that new normal should actually look like—particularly when it comes to how we deliver fire protection.
So here’s my two cents.
We’ve Known the Problem for Decades
The United States has known it has a fire problem for a long time—at least since 1948, when President Harry S. Truman received the Report of the Continuing Committee of the President’s Conference on Fire Prevention and Education. In responding to that report, our 33rd president said:
The serious losses in life and property resulting annually from fires cause me deep concern. I am sure that such unnecessary waste can be reduced. The substantial progress made in the science of fire prevention and fire protection in this country during the past forty years convinces me that the means are available for limiting this unnecessary destruction.
Truman wasn’t alone in that assessment. The authors of that report—and the participants in the five Wingspread conferences on fire service administration, education, and research (1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, and 2003)—all reached essentially the same conclusion when addressing America’s fire problem.
Their message was clear and consistent:
Fire prevention and accident prevention employ the same techniques. Over the years, approaches to the accident problem have been described as the “Three E’s” of safety—Engineering, Enforcement, and Education. These Three E’s are equally applicable to fire prevention and protection.
An Expensive, Reactive, and Risk-Heavy Model
Yet despite decades of consensus, we continue to deliver fire protection in much the same way.
Fire protection, as we currently practice it, is overwhelmingly people-, equipment-, and facility-intensive. Firefighters, apparatus, stations, training centers, and administrative facilities represent a massive and ever-growing financial commitment for local governments.
It is also, at its core, a reactive service. Firefighters and equipment sit in fixed locations, waiting for something to go wrong. When the alarm sounds, they respond—often at high speed, through congested streets, much like the horse-drawn steam engines of a century ago.
And when that response begins, so does a cascade of risk: apparatus crashes, firefighter injuries and fatalities during response, suppression, and even the return to quarters.
This raises a fundamental question we rarely ask out loud: Why do we continue to cling to a fire protection model that is both extraordinarily expensive and overloaded with risk?
Shifting Responsibility: From Response to Prevention
There is a better way—but it requires a fundamental shift in responsibility. Instead of assuming that the community’s primary obligation is to extinguish fires after they occur, we must move toward a model where individuals and organizations are responsible for not having a fire in the first place.
Fire service leaders and local elected officials need to re-engineer fire protection using the same Three E’s we’ve been talking about for nearly 80 years.
Engineering
• Require residential sprinklers in all newly constructed one- and two-family homes. Full stop.
• Update building codes so that all materials must meet meaningful fire-resistance performance standards—not merely “gravity-defiance” standards.
• In wildland–urban interface areas, prohibit combustible building materials and mandate the use of block, concrete, stucco, and other non-combustible assemblies.
• Mandate the use of fire-safe cigarettes.
Education
• Require that every residential property—rental and owner-occupied—receive a plain-language summary of the locality’s fire prevention code, in English and other languages appropriate to the community.
• Require fire departments and school systems to jointly deliver a standardized fire prevention curriculum in elementary, middle, and high schools at least every two years.
• Require completion of a basic fire prevention course as a prerequisite for obtaining a residential lease or purchasing a home.
• Require insurance companies to inspect rental and owner-occupied properties before issuing coverage, and to require annual affidavits of compliance with fire prevention requirements as a condition of renewal.
Enforcement
• Investigate all fires and issue court summonses when occupant negligence is determined to be the cause—just as we do with traffic crashes. If you’re at fault, you’re held accountable.
• Bill occupants for the cost of fire suppression when negligence is determined to be the cause.
• Fine builders and contractors when investigations show that improper materials or construction practices either caused a fire or contributed to its spread.
• Fine rental property owners who fail to maintain their properties in compliance with local fire prevention codes.
• Incorporate a community’s level of fire protection and history of fire loss into the bond-rating evaluations used by financial institutions.
“Harsh”? Or Honest?
Does this sound harsh? Unrealistic? So does:
- Closing fire stations and laying off firefighters.
- Continuing to expose firefighters to increasing levels of injury and death due to preventable fires caused by negligence.
- Endlessly increasing the tax burden on local residents to sustain an antiquated, reactive fire protection model.
Fire service leaders often say we need to “think outside the box” and make better use of technology. But piling more—and more expensive—technology onto a fundamentally flawed model is not the answer.
If we want different outcomes, we need a different culture.
What are we waiting for?
Sidebar: Wingspread—We’ve Known Better for Decades
For forty years, the American fire service has been told—by its own best thinkers—that the way we deliver fire protection is fundamentally flawed.
Between 1966 and 2006, five Wingspread Conferences brought together senior fire chiefs, educators, researchers, and national leaders to confront the fire problem in the United States. These were not trade shows or committee meetings. They were small, invitation-only, no‑nonsense discussions designed to answer one question:
Why do we keep losing so many people and so much property to fire when we already know how to prevent it?
The answers were remarkably consistent—and deeply uncomfortable.
Every Wingspread Conference concluded that America’s fire problem is largely self‑inflicted. Fires are driven by human behavior, weak building standards, poor enforcement, and a societal expectation that someone else—usually firefighters—will clean up the mess. Emergency response alone, no matter how fast or well-equipped, cannot solve a prevention problem.
Wingspread said—again and again—that real progress requires:
- Shifting responsibility upstream, to occupants, builders, manufacturers, insurers, and policymakers
- Using Engineering, Education, and Enforcement as aggressively as we use engines and ladders
- Re‑examining the long‑standing belief that fire protection is solely a local government obligation
In plain terms, Wingspread challenged the fire service—and society—to stop treating fires as unavoidable “acts of God” and start treating them as preventable failures.
And yet, decades later, the dominant fire protection model remains largely unchanged: expensive, reactive, and dangerously dependent on firefighters absorbing risk created by others’ negligence. We continue to invest billions in response while hesitating to demand accountability for prevention.
Wingspread’s ideas weren’t radical. They were rational. What was radical—and still is—was the suggestion that preventing fires might matter more than heroically responding to them.
The tragedy isn’t that we don’t know what to do.
The tragedy is that we’ve known for generations—and still haven’t done it.
