Owensboro fire department presents community risk assessment as part of five-year push for accreditation

An unnamed fire department presenter told the Owensboro City Commission that the department has spent roughly five years preparing for accreditation through the Center for Public Safety Excellence and outlined a Community Risk Assessment (CRA) and Standards of Cover (SOC) that will feed an improvement plan.

The presenter said the CRA 'paints a picture' of the city's vulnerabilities 'to citizens, buildings, the environment and economic vitality' and that the SOC maps deployment to that risk. He described a self-assessment of roughly 250 performance indicators covering human resources, fleet management, dispatch and staffing, and said the documents will inform priorities such as training, staffing and station location.

On response standards, the presenter cited benchmarking drawn from national guidance (transcript reference to NFPA 17 10, commonly cited as NFPA 1710 for structural fire response timing) and said the department is using ninetieth-percentile times to evaluate call processing, turnout and travel metrics. "If your benchmark is 64 seconds and you're doing it 59 seconds," he said, "next time our benchmark is actually going to be less than 59 seconds because we always want to lean forward and do better." He credited Paul Nave and dispatchers for achieving a 59-second baseline for call processing.

Using a critical task analysis, the presenter illustrated how low-risk incidents may require four people while maximum-risk incidents can need as many as 31 personnel; he warned that a maximum-risk event (for example, a high-rise or large commercial structure) could exceed the department's minimum staffing of 27 and therefore require mutual aid.

Items the presenter listed in an improvement plan included installing automated vehicle location so dispatch can assign the closest unit, keeping units in assigned run areas during peak hours to improve response times, evaluating watercraft deployment for river incidents, aligning training to critical task analysis, and studying a best location for Station 4 to better serve the Southeast corridor. He said the CRA/SOC report (about 180 pages in current draft) will be made public as a searchable PDF and that the commission will be asked later to adopt the documents as the authority having jurisdiction (AHJ).

The presenter took questions from commissioners. In response to a question about the most challenging scenarios, he identified high-rise incidents (example given: Roosevelt House) and significant hospital incidents as events that draw multiple units and can rapidly draw on agency staffing. When asked about whether recruits must be EMT-certified at hire, he said entry-level recruits are not required to have EMT certification at hire but must obtain it during an 18-month probationary period; lateral hires are required to hold EMT credentials.

The department will finalize the assessment and return to the commission with a request to adopt the risk assessment and standards of cover and with related improvement-plan items that could affect staffing, equipment and station siting.