NERIS for Volunteer Fire Departments

NERIS for Volunteer Fire Departments

The first release of the NERIS specification is available in draft. NERIS is built with NFIRS in mind (of course, it is our current foundations) however with NFIRS having been created roughly 50 years ago, that might not address the needs of the today’s volunteer fire service.

As volunteer firefighters and volunteer firefighting organizations, let’s review the draft specification with an eye to volunteer fire departments, and our needs and challenges.

• Is it capturing a representation of a fire department that matches our organizations? Does it capture our types of volunteer firefighters?
• Is it capturing incident information that allows for the analysis we need in the volunteer fire service? It doesn’t have to be about the call itself alone, what about the people who respond, the apparatus they use.

What is an active firefighter?

As with the NFIRS specification, the NERIS specification for a fire department contains a count of “active firefighters” (plus some other numbers for EMS, and some for civilian support.) What is an active firefighter in today’s volunteer fire service? Is it somebody who can pack up into SCBA and mount an interior attack, or is it the volunteer who can drive apparatus to scene and engine it? Is it somebody who can pass the red card arduous pack test and hike into the mountains to fight a fire, but are not training to respond to a structure fire or medical call? What is “active” is it 20% of calls or more or less?

Do we need to capture a more accurate picture of volunteer firefighters?

Who is running the calls?

Do we need to capture the real world firefighter information of who is responding, and how long they’ve been doing it, and how much support do they get? How many departments have the same few people running all calls, especially those night calls. How long can they keep volunteering their time, especially as the call volume increases.

What types of calls?

Are we dealing with more electric vehicle MVAs, or electric device fires? I’m sure these are covered in the NERIS specification, but what else do we need to capture at the volunteer department level?

Volunteer Fire Departments and NERIS?

What else should we be capturing? What other data do we need for an incident? Do we want to record the ages of apparatus we are responding with? The age of the gear we are wearing? The age of the firefighters? Sure, we don’t need to record every iota of detail, but picking the right data to capture is important to getting the big picture clear.

What NERIS data do we want to capture for Volunteer Fire Department issues and concerns?