The mission of the fire service includes the preservation of life and the safeguarding of our communities in addition to protecting their property. We do this through a relentless commitment to emergency preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery. But are the current practices good enough?
While often derided as “150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress,” this expression is clearly not true of modern firefighters. In fact, the fire service has been proactive about leveraging technology when it comes to the tasks that we perform on the fireground. This is especially accurate when it comes to the safety of our crews because the expectation is that “everyone goes home” safely at the end of their shift. Advancements to help make this goal a reality include biotelemetry to monitor individual performance, mixed reality for both training and response, autonomous vehicles to prevent responder collisions, and enhancing thermal imaging with computer vision to improve edge detection, object recognition, and even warn of imminent structural collapse or flashover conditions.
So, what are the parallels for protecting the safety of our communities? Community Risk Reduction (CRR) is an effective strategy that aims to reduce the impact and occurrence of local risks. These efforts often focus on primary and secondary prevention techniques to modify public behavior or influence events. But tertiary prevention and mitigation practices can be inspired by insight that allows us to react to the future not simply the present. We can gain knowledge from studying our past and explaining its patterns to extrapolate that understanding into a useful working model of the future by providing what the Canadian author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, calls foresight.
While often derided as “150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress,” this expression is clearly not true of modern firefighters. In fact, the fire service has been proactive about leveraging technology when it comes to the tasks that we perform on the fireground. This is especially accurate when it comes to the safety of our crews because the expectation is that “everyone goes home” safely at the end of their shift. Advancements to help make this goal a reality include biotelemetry to monitor individual performance, mixed reality for both training and response, autonomous vehicles to prevent responder collisions, and enhancing thermal imaging with computer vision to improve edge detection, object recognition, and even warn of imminent structural collapse or flashover conditions.
So, what are the parallels for protecting the safety of our communities? Community Risk Reduction (CRR) is an effective strategy that aims to reduce the impact and occurrence of local risks. These efforts often focus on primary and secondary prevention techniques to modify public behavior or influence events. But tertiary prevention and mitigation practices can be inspired by insight that allows us to react to the future not simply the present. We can gain knowledge from studying our past and explaining its patterns to extrapolate that understanding into a useful working model of the future by providing what the Canadian author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, calls foresight.
