Horn is tip of the ISO-berg: A case study in how not to study cases

Auburn, Seneca Falls, Waterloo, Canandaigua, and Trumansburg used to have fire horns. Now they don't. The fire chief of Trumansburg, which has an all volunteer fire department, including drivers, shut theirs off just last year. Have these communities willfully put their lives and property at greater risk for the sake of a little peace and quiet?

That’s the essence of the question asked by several city residents, but raised publicly by Ken Camera. The question is: Is the horn necessary or is there a better emergency management system that Geneva could use? It goes without saying that the discussion is not about the service of those who fight fires, who give up their time to be trained and who risk their lives to protect us. We are thankful for the work they do and no sane person would want to disadvantage their notification system. That should be clear, but unfortunately it’s not.

Camera, a City of Geneva resident and downtown businessman, approached City Council, first by e-mail and then from the podium at the December Council meeting, asking the City to consider turning off the fire horn if it had outlived it’s useful purpose.

Ever since Camera launched his proposal, there’s been a flurry of e-mail among Councilors. At that same meeting, Fire Chief Moore was asked to come to the podium to address Council on the merits of the horn. He said that in combination with other, more effective, technologies for sounding the alarm and dispatching, the horn contributed to the well being of the City. The horn added points to our ISO score sheet, which helped keep our ISO rating solid, which helped keep our insurance rates down. In short, the horn was a valuable tradition worth saving.

Since that meeting, the e-mails have continued, with Camera himself included and participating in much of it. It’s been mostly follow up questions, Councilors weighing in, this way and that, on the issue, and the slow accumulation of facts for the “fact set” Camera has asked Council to construct. A fact set would help to resolve this issue, but also, to model fact-based decision making in general.

While we, Capraro and Augustine, are not opposed to the horn, we are opposed to the way this situation has been handled, or mis-handled, by council. We believe that every member of this community has the right to ask questions about the way government operates. And we believe that City Councilors are elected, in part, to research those questions and provide their constituents with the most accurate information available. The point is not to get every person to share one opinion, it’s to allow every person to share the same set of facts. Good government requires that questions be handled in an orderly, unemotional way by council and staff working together and communicating directly, respectfully, and effectively with residents.

But that didn’t happen here. No councilor took the lead on the issue, no councilor asked for the resident to be provided with a memo. on the role of the fire horn in the city’s operations. Instead, one councilor berated Camera for not going to the firehouse and getting the information himself. Is that what we want city residents doing when they have a question? Becoming ‘fact-finding vigilantes’? If someone has a question about street work, should they call their councilor or go flag down a DPW worker? If they have a question about the police department should they ask their councilor or should they stop in at the public safety building and disrupt the operations? We think it’s pretty clear why wards have council representatives in the first place--it’s to bring government to the people not to ask all the people to go chase down the government!

So the discussion of the horn seems to center on the City’s “ISO rating”. We referenced this in response to a comment on a previous post. ISO, or the Insurance Services Organization, is an industry think tank that offers products and services to insurance providers and their clients, including the Public Protection Classification Program (PPCP).

The PPCP provides insurers with an objective rating of a community’s fire protection efforts, derived from ISO’s own data driven models. It gives insurers a good idea of the risk involved in insuring buildings in a particular location. Based on the City’s ISO documents, the City’s ISO rating has been “3”, since 1995, when it moved up from “4”. The City scored 77.54 points out of a possible 100, putting it within the ISO 3 range, which is 70-79.99 points. That was quite a jump in points because the best score for the previous rating of 4 would have been 69.99, so there was an increase of at least 7.55 points.

The three main sections of the ISO rating sheet are: (1) receiving and handling fire alarms; (2) fire department; (3) water supply. For the fire alarms section, which “reviews the facilities provided for the general public to report fires, and for the operator on duty at the communications center to dispatch fire department companies to the fire,” the City received 8.74/10 points. The sub-section scores were: telephone service, .74/2.00; operators, 3.00/3.00; and dispatch circuits, 3.00/3.00.

ISO distributes an occasional survey to communities, known as the Fire Protection Survey, which they compare with existing data on a particular community. If there are significant changes, a new PPCP process would start up. Geneva’s most recent survey was completed, July 26, 2007, and did not prompt a full review.

The fire alarm/communications section of our July, 2007, survey has checked the following boxes in answer to the question (#6), “How are the fire department members notified of a fire alarm? Check all that apply.” Items checked are: fire alarm radio; home radio/scanners; fire station telegraph system; outside air horn; fore station voice alarm; pager-voice. Items not checked are: fire station CAD/printers; pager-alerting only; other; fire station direct phone; pager-alpha numeric; fire station facsimile; outside siren.

(Curiously, the Harris study (see below) states the Geneva Fire Department “maintains a primary dispatch station equipped with a radio system and Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) work station and printer. It is unclear why that box was not checked.)

In speaking with ISO mitigation staff, Capraro learned that if a community has good telecommunications, dispatching, and pagers, having an old-fashioned fire horn makes no difference in its ability to suppress fires, which is the basis of ISO scoring and ratings, and the true measure of firefighting effectiveness. In other words, a community with good telecommunications, dispatching, and pagers is every bit as good at putting out fires as a community with good telecommunications, dispatching, pagers, and horns.

The question of response times has come up. Do firefighters get to the scene of a fire faster with the horn working than without it? ISO defines response time as the time it takes firefighting equipment to get to a fire after the information has been received. It does not measure actual times, but relies on a formula which includes average vehicle speeds, etc. In any event, response times are measureable, and whether or not they affect ISO ratings, they could be studied, if they are a consideration. Testimony from several of our firefighters indicates that the fire horn does alert volunteers to mobilize whether they have a pager or not.

The City of Geneva has expended a great deal of energy over the question of dispatching and fire and police communications. The July 2006, Public Safety Dispatch Systems Assessment report prepared by Jack Harris, a municipal communications consultant, discussed fire dispatch. According to the report, the Geneva Fire Department is a secondary Public Service Answering Point (PSAP) for the Ontario County 911 system. Currently, fire department dispatchers answer all incoming land line 911 calls and connects them to police, EMS, or the appropriate fire station. Additionally, the police department receives calls on its non-911 line.

The Harris report suggested that the city centralize the emergency dispatching into one center that could receive calls and transmit information. The city has made some steps towards this effort, including the hiring of more civilian dispatchers to free uniformed police officers from telephone duty and appropriating money for an engineering plan for the center. Council has been told that the police and fire departments support this plan and we have, in turn, supported these efforts. We believe that ISO would look favorably upon such an arrangement.

In the end, council tossed around some ideas for minimizing the horn’s effect on downtown without minimizing its effectiveness for the department. It was then voted to give the Fire Department the authority to make whatever changes seemed to strike the best balance.

We are grateful for the service of our police and fire departments. It is unfortunate that a resident’s question was mishandled by council in such a way that the fire department felt personally attacked. But perhaps the discussion about ISO ratings has opened our eyes to the large issues of emergency communications in general and will help to move these important upgrades forward in a more timely manner.