U.S. Fire Administrator Ernie Mitchell announced a national fire-prevention campaign at an Institution of Fire Engineers’ meeting during FRI. It is the first-ever unified fire-safety campaign across federal, state and local levels.
Helping push the “Fire is Everyone’s Fight” campaign is Vision 20/20, a fire-service group that works at the local level to implement national fire-prevention programs.
Mitchell said USFA will not be pumping a lot of money into the campaign, but rather investing its people to create campaign materials that can be disseminated at the local level.
“Our goal is to have public safety announcements and get partners in communities across the nation to get engaged in it,” Mitchell said.
Without a large financial push from the federal agency, it may be difficult for such a program to rise above the noise of other public service messages and gain that level of branding that Smokey enjoys.
“We think it is a matter of consistency of message, repeating the message and that we are all speaking with one voice,” Mitchell said. “If people are hearing the same message and local firefighters are spreading that message, eventually it is like you keep hearing a tune it sticks in your head.”
Mitchell said that it takes time for such messages to take hold with the public and to achieve that this program does not have a one- or two-year shelf life. “The idea is to, over time, spread the message and get communities involved.”
One of the difficulties with any prevention program is measuring its success. Mitchell said they will look at historical civilian fire injury and death statistics and compare that with those after the program’s launch.
“We’ll be trying to capture what difference it may be making,” he said. “We have the historical data and we’ll see what changes there may be. Scientifically connecting it to a specific program is difficult, but we hope to see some improvement.”
He does point to the overall success of the Fire Administration in preventing civilian deaths. There were about 12,000 deaths per year when the administration was established in 1974; that number is now down to about 3,500, he said.
One way this, or any campaign, will succeed is by hitting high-risk segments of the population.
“We know there are segments of the population that are not getting the message,” Mitchell said. “This campaign will help us get to those places.”
Those highest at risk are typically the very old and very young. There have been improvements with the very young. But with the baby boomers getting old, the older population remains at risk.
Mitchell said the administration does not have people to send out into the field, but will be encouraging local entities to focus this campaign on those high-risk sections.
“The idea is that this program can help prevent some of those fires and give them early warning,” he said. “This program will work with other, well-established programs. We’re doing this in combination with others to come at the problem in as many ways as we can.”