The city of Vancouver wants to eliminate preventable fires. The latest results from a pilot project, presented Monday evening to the Vancouver City Council, show in many ways that goal is achievable.
In 2015, the Vancouver Fire Marshal’s Office, led by Fire Marshal Heidi Scarpelli, embarked on a mission to eliminate fire deaths, firefighter injuries and preventable structure fires. The campaign is known as Zero is Our Hero. As part of that effort, the department broke down the process into three areas: education, engineering and enforcement.
Education has been the biggest effort so far. Based on a heat map that details the geographical location of every fire from 2005 to 2013, Scarpelli’s office identified the region with the most fires, and the top three causes. Cooking, smoking and candles topped the list.
Scarpelli said the department went out to about 1,700 homes in central Vancouver armed with multilingual educational materials in print and video formats to teach residents how to prevent the most common fires. The education-based initiative is called Project Home Safe.
“We didn’t want these fires to start from the beginning,” she said. “It’s been really great results.”
The department collected data from the last three years and submitted it to Washington State University for analysis. The data found that education in this door-to-door fashion is effective in reducing residential fires.
Scarpelli said the program will continue for another four years, and thanks to two federal grants — for $173,000 and $213,000 — she knows her office is on the right track.
Ultimately, the department wants to roll out the education initiative service-area wide, she said. But that’s not all the fire marshal’s office is doing to achieve its Zero is Our Hero goals.
The department visited every site with fire protection equipment and worked with business owners to not only educate owners about their systems, but catalog where and what type of system each business uses.
Scarpelli said this means her office will start 2019 with a clear reporting backlog and will be able to complete annual reports in real time.
Reducing false alarms using this technique wasn’t quite as effective as projected — the fire marshal’s office found a 20 percent reduction in lieu of the 40 percent as predicted — but Scarpelli said she is optimistic about further reducing that number in the future.
On the enforcement side, Scarpelli said her office has cited and abated about 65,000 fire hazards since 2015.
“It’s hard to quantify how many fires you actually stop,” she said. “But this is a good measure.”
Looking forward, there are two proposed initiatives that would bring Vancouver even closer to its Zero is Our Hero goal.
One would require sprinklers in new construction and another would levy a civil citation for starting a preventable fire. The resulting fine from the citation would be waived after fire safety training is completed.
“Vancouver can change how it thinks and feels about fire injuries and fire death,” Scarpelli said. “When a civilian is killed by fire, it is not their time or fate. And when a firefighter is killed, it is not part of the job.”
The majority of fires in Vancouver are preventable, she added. These initiatives and their success show, with time and continued support from the city council, zero fires, deaths or injuries is possible.
