CRR Radio

In this episode of Short Takes we talk with Katie Harrington from Worcester, MA about her program she'll be presenting on at The Vision 20/20 Model Performance in CRR Symposium. You can learn more and register at www.StrategicFire.org/symposium6 ​Approximately 80 city employees, hospitals, and human service non-profit members originally assembled to create Worcester’s Hub-Cor, a collaborative project to address the needs of the underserved members of our community that have an impact on our service delivery. Hub-Cor is now a meeting of now 22 organizations and an additional 9 in the background that meets weekly to address individuals or families suffering mental illness, homelessness, domestic violence, child/elder abuse or neglect and any other acute elevated risk that may plague the city. The group develops systematic, analytical, and economical safety plan and proposes a means to reduce risk that can be quickly implemented with positive results.

In this episode of Short Takes we talk with Paulette Church from Colorado about her program she'll be presenting on at The Vision 20/20 Model Performance in CRR Symposium. You can learn more and register at www.StrategicFire.org/symposium6 Falls Creek, located in Durango, Colorado, is a nationally recognized Firewise USA® site, focusing attention on the “Home Ignition Zone.” In 2018 the community was impacted by the 416 Fire, one of the largest wildfires in Colorado history. The wildfire mitigation actions residents took prior to the fire, working closely with their local fire department, was credited with the survival of every structure in the community with no injuries to emergency responders or residents.

In this episode of Short Takes we talk with Kim Stouse from the Pocatello Fire Department about her presentation at the upcoming Vision 20/20 Project Model Performance in CRR Symposium on February 17-20. You can learn more and register at www.StrategicFire.org/Symposium6 Pocatello Fire Department/Bannock County Ambulance recognized a significant increase in calls to assisted living facilities which accounted for over 11% of emergency medical calls. Representatives from the assisted living facilities, emergency response organizations, and state officials formed a committee and wrote protocols for calling 911 versus utilizing facility staff. These protocols were adopted by all of the local assisted living facilities. As of March of 2019, calls to assisted living facilities have declined by approximately 50% from the highest year and now represent 4.5% of total medical calls for service.

In this episode of Short Takes we talk with Mike Sedlacek from the Madison (AL) Fire and Rescue Department about his presentation at the upcoming Vision 20/20 Project Model Performance in CRR Symposium on February 17-20. You can learn more and register at www.StrategicFire.org/Symposium6 In 2018 Madison Fire & Rescue created a Virtual Reality fire education program aimed at educating children about fire risks. We focused on 4th and 5th graders and created a multi-pronged approach program with two VR scenarios and a trailer with iPad kiosks. We partnered with multiple local companies and organizations in developing the program and developed technology solutions that did not exist. Our program includes detailed data reporting and we have seen positive trends in baseline data and knowledge trends.

In this episode of Short Takes we talk with Will Broscious from the Columbia-Richland Fire and Rescue Department about his presentation at the upcoming Vision 20/20 Project Model Performance in CRR Symposium on February 17-20. You can learn more and register at www.StrategicFire.org/Symposium6 ​Our program is designed to recruit volunteers by taking a different approach. As opposed to simply recruiting volunteers, we began to change our strategy in mid-2018 with a goal to recruit volunteers that can assist our department in various ways. This new approach has led to an increase in our CRR abilities including the successful completion of our first community risk assessment conducted by a local college student that was recruited to join our department as well as an increase in the number of volunteer fire fighters.

In this podcast we talk with Captain Mike Sedlacek from the Madison, Alabama, Fire Department where they built a cutting-edge education trailer that uses iPads and virtual reality to teach fire safety to children in the community. These tools provide the fire department with an incredible amount of data that allows it to fine-tune its educational delivery program. The next step? The same idea, but for severe weather. Truly, #CRRinAction!

Are you thinking of submitting a presentation for the Model Performance in CRR Symposium 6? Then you want to listen to this episode of CRR Radio where we talk with Monica Colby about what makes for a strong proposal and how to give the best presentation you can. Monica has been involved in evaluating proposals in just about every symposium, so she has a lot of experience to draw on to help you. "A really good proposal will start with your why's, your formative evaluation. Get to the point, be succinct, give us numbers and data. Tell the story, but do it in a quick, short way. In process, we're looking for what you did and trying to encourage everyone to start documenting what you're doing, why you did it, what mistakes you made, how you fix that, what you ran into, what you found works. Those are the things that we're really looking for is to be able to share that with one another and to be able to compare. Why did one program work and another one not work? What will work for my community?"

In this conversation with Matt Hoehler, we talk about how NIST is incorporating video to give people a much more immersive experience in wildland and structural fires. "One reason this is valuable, is just the ability to allow somebody to experience a fire from a perspective that they would otherwise not be able to experience, allows people to understand what we do in fire research and also what, you know, fire protection experts and what firefighters do and the environments that they're working in," said Hoehler. "So, being able to just put cameras in this environment, there's value of that in that and the fact that you've moved from a 2D view into a 360 view, means that the viewer gets to decide what they want to look at, rather than having whoever's shooting a 2D photograph decide what you're going to be looking at. "

One of the first steps in CRR is having a good handle on the makeup of your community - the people, the homes, the businesses and the industry. Data on all of this can be gathered from a variety of sources, both locally and nationally. In this conversation on CRR Radio we talk with Chip Walker from the U.S. Census Bureau on the tools that are available online for any jurisdiction to use in getting a better understanding of their community. We also talk about how the U.S. Census Bureau has resources that can be of immeasurable help when a disaster strikes.

CRR Week is a grass-roots movement that is starting to spread across the nation that will take place the week of January 20th, starting on Martin Luther King Day. Listen to Chiefs Chris Walker (Wilmington Fire, NC), Deanna Harrington (Arvada Fire Protection District, CO) and Josh Fulbright (SC State Fire Marshal's Office) fill us in on what it is all about!

in this episode we talk with West Midlands Chief Fire Officer Phil Loach in the UK about the upcoming symposium on international best practices in CRR that the UK National Fire Chiefs Council is doing in partnership with The Vision 20/20 Project. You can find more information about this ground-breaking symposium at https://www.nationalfirechiefs.org.uk/NFCC-Events/nfcc-vision-20-20-international-symposium/8359?OccId=12034

In the second part of this two-part series we finish our conversation with Captain Joe Powers, FO, from the Henrico County Division of Fire. This episode looks at the external side effects of CRR, focusing on how CRR can have a positive impact on the fire department's relationship with your community's governance. City and town administrators may speak a different language, focused on outcomes (lives and property saved) versus outputs (response time, number of calls), and CRR can be an instrumental part of helping you bridge this gap.  According to Captain Powers, "When we start thinking in the form of outcomes rather than outputs, we're able to start looking at, let's say commercial fires in a completely different way. Rather than thinking about the number of commercial fires that we ran last year over a given period of time, we can start looking at the tax revenue that we sustained through having a fire department that's able to respond quickly and mitigate incidents. We can also look at the job savings that occur. Outcomes are really the things that people care about. Outputs make pretty graphs a lot of times, but when it comes down to what elected officials and our community leaders are looking for, they're really looking for outcomes." Also, be sure to read Joe's blog post on this topic over at the Center for Public Safety Excellence. https://cpse.org/2019/07/16/side-effects-of-crr/

In this episode we talk with retired Australian Fire Chief Neil Bibby about how a group of fellow retired chiefs are coming together to work on the issue of the convergence of CRR and climate change. We also talk about how CRR is being implemented in Asia and what lessons we might learn from their experiences. You can reach Neil Bibby at neil@people-innovation.biz. Some links of interest from this episode's podcast: The Climate Council https://www.climatecouncil.org.au Bushfire & Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre http://www.bnhcrc.com.au

In this episode of CRR Radio we talk with Assistant Chief Rich Lewellyn with the Everett (Washington) Fire Department about his Executive Fire Officer research paper that focused on using GIS to identify opioid usage and create a data-visualization tool that could help communities in allocating resources to fight this epidemic. This paper is available for download from the National Fire Academy https://nfa.usfa.fema.gov/pdf/efop/efo244696.pdf

Chelsea Rubadou, Community Risk Reduction Strategist with NFPA talked with CRR Radio about the new standard, NFPA 1300 Standard on Community Risk Assessment and Community Risk Reduction Plan Development. This standard will be available in early June, and Chelsea gives us a great overview. And be sure to listen all the end for an update on the new CRA grant project that NFPA is launching!