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Owensboro fire officials present accreditation-driven community risk assessment and improvement plan
Summary
Owensboro Fire Department briefed the city commission on a Center for Public Safety Excellence accreditation effort, detailing a community risk assessment, standards of cover, staffing implications and an improvement plan that includes AVL dispatch, station location review and training alignment.
Chief William Hunt and Owensboro fire officials presented the department's multi-year accreditation effort and a community risk assessment intended to align fire and emergency medical deployments with local risks. The presentation described risk classification, a critical-task analysis, risk scoring and standards of cover benchmarking against NFPA 1710.
The presentation explained why the accreditation process matters: it ties the department's strategic plan and roughly 250 performance indicators to measurable response benchmarks and an improvement plan. "A community risk assessment is essentially applying a methodology to better understand the risks that can occur within our community," the presenter said, describing how the assessment catalogs risks to people, buildings, the environment and economic vitality.
Officials walked commissioners through planning zones based on the department's five stations and how those zones inform data collection and deployment decisions. The critical-task analysis breaks incidents into task-level components to determine how many hands and what equipment are required for different incident severities. The presenter contrasted a low-risk vehicle or dumpster fire (which may require four personnel) with a maximum-risk structural incident that could require an effective response force of up to 31 people and therefore rely on mutual aid when on-duty staffing (a stated minimum of 27) is insufficient.
Staff described the department's response-time benchmarking approach and cited specific metrics used to evaluate performance: alarm-processing time, turnout time and travel time are tracked in the CAD and records systems and analyzed at the 90th percentile. The presentation noted a 64-second call-processing benchmark (90th percentile) and credited dispatcher Paul Nave for achieving a measured 59-second baseline over three fiscal years (2022–2025).
To close, officials outlined concrete improvement steps drawn from the accreditation work: implementation of automated vehicle location (AVL) to dispatch the closest unit, keeping units in assigned run areas during peak hours, evaluating watercraft deployment, studying optimal siting for Station 4, aligning training with the critical-task analysis and revising the community risk reduction plan to focus on measurable outcomes. "The document will be available to the public as a searchable PDF," the presenter said, and staff indicated they will return to the commission to request formal adoption of the assessment, standards and improvement plan.
Next steps: the department will publish the CRA/standards-of-cover document, continue implementing the listed improvements and seek the commission's formal adoption of the recommendations and performance benchmarks.
