A Needs Assessment Of The Us Fire Service PDF Download

Fire service needs are extensive across the board, and in nearly every area of need, the smaller the community protected, the greater the need. Needs have declined to a considerable degree in a number of areas, particularly personal protective and firefighting equipment, two types of resources that received large shares of funding from the Assistance to Firefighters grants (AFG). Declines in needs have been more modest in some other important areas, such as training, which have received much smaller shares of AFG grant funds. In all areas emphasized by the AFG and SAFER grants, there is ample evidence of impact from the grants but also considerable residual needs still to be addressed, even for needs that have seen considerable need reduction in the past decade. There has been little change in the ability of departments, using only local resources, to handle certain types of unusually challenging incidents, including two types of homeland security scenarios (structural collapse and chem/bio agent attack) and two types of large-scale emergency responses (a wildland/urban interface fire and a developing major flood). However, the surveys have indicated improvement in the development of written agreements to help in the use of outside resources. This may provide the strongest base on which to build, namely, the creation of regional and national agreements to allow costs of shared resources to be shared across a much wider area while also providing a protocol for any community to respond to an unusually challenging incident that is very unlikely within the community but not so unlikely within the entire region.