Newport News Fire Department piloting an online dashboard to reduce risks in the community

The Newport News Fire Department was selected to pilot a tool that Fire Chief Jeffrey S. Johnson believes will be essential for fire departments within the next 10 years.

It’s a digital community risk-assessment dashboard that catalogs incidents to which the department responds, along with details about the nature and cause of the incident. The dashboard, created by the National Fire Protection Association, also tracks the steps the department takes to help prevent them from happening again.

“The short version of how we benefit from it is we’re going to get an up-to-the-minute, real-time snapshot of what’s going on in the community, and then we can identify potential risk or high risks that are occurring in our community and find strategic ways to prioritize and resolve those issues,” Johnson said.

Newport News is one of 250 departments across the country — and one of four in Virginia — to have free access to the dashboard in exchange for their feedback to refine the tool.

“My title is fire chief, but the truth is I’m really a risk manager for the entire city,” Johnson said.

The dashboard will help with fire prevention, but it will also be able to help identify potential problems such as intersections with frequent accidents that could lead to changes. The dashboard could identify resident care facilities that may have floors or rugs that create an additional fall risk.

“When you think of it, it’s not just for fires. It is absolutely about assessing the risk, all types of risk,” Johnson said. “It’s looking at everything and saying, here are the issues that impact your community on a daily basis. These issues here have a larger impact on your community and then we can start breaking it down into priorities because if you aim for everything, you typically miss them all.”

The tool will help the department prioritize problems by determining the types of incidents that result in the largest amount of financial loss and displacement.

Some, such as tree limbs falling during storms, can’t really be mitigated beyond asking people to remove dead trees, Johnson said. The dashboard will help with education for the problems that can be addressed.

Newport News was selected for the pilot program because the department is seeking reaccreditation through the Center for Public Safety Excellence and because of its “robust prevention programs” to fire safety, child safety seats and smoke alarm installation programs, said Karen Berard-Reed, community risk reduction strategist for the National Fire Protection Association. The department is also in the process of refining its fire inspections process.

Berard-Reed said the Newport News programs could be streamlined using the dashboard and it would help with refining the tool for all the departments.

While the pilot program makes the dashboard free to the department for now, Johnson said he already plans to invest in it after the pilot is complete.

“I think what you’ll see in the next 10 years with this online database is that every modern fire department will have to be connected to it to be effective,” Johnson said. “I think that’s the exciting part about it — we’re on the ground floor helping build this out with our community something that’s going to benefit the country within the decade.”

The fire department was already tracking incidents but observing trends required investing time and manpower into pulling the reports and doing an analysis. Communicating with other fire departments about risk-reduction strategies would mean reaching out to selected departments and hoping they’d respond.

After a fire at an apartment complex, members of the fire department usually go door-to-door with handouts about checking smoke detectors and making exit plans, but the department hasn’t tracked those interactions to determine their effectiveness.

Johnson said one of the goals with the dashboard is to track the risk prevention strategies to determine what really works.

When the dashboard is active, it will be added to the fire department’s website so citizens can see information about what kind of calls and safety hazards the community is facing and the action the department is taking to reduce those risks.

“Not only does it make us more modern going forward as an organization, but it gives us the ability to provide a clear picture to our community of what we’re doing to keep them safe and where their tax dollars are going to keep them safe,” Johnson said.

Grant applications, as well as government bodies, often want to know what kinds of fires the department responds to and what it’s doing to prevent those fires. Johnson says the tool will make it easier to provide statistics.

“In this day and age we need to be able to justify that request and you can justify it with data, true data, and not just a gut feeling as a fire chief that I need this or that,” Johnson said.

“We should always be able to give answers to elected officials when they want to know what we’re doing with money and why we did this or that — it should be an easy answer, the how, why and what we’re doing,” he added.

While the tool is new to the city, the focus on risk reduction is not. About a year ago, Newport News renamed its fire marshal’s office the Community Risk Reduction Division.

“We think once we acknowledge that’s what we do, it opens us up for a whole lot of possibilities to make ourselves better at reducing risk. It gets the community more involved and the rest of the fire department more involved,” Johnson said.

He’s seen fire inspection reports transform from papers with checkboxes and a few notes that are stashed away in folders to reports that can be shared online. Johnson sees the dashboard as the next step in the evolution of the reports.

Johnson expects the changes will move beyond how reports are filed. As more cities and counties are able to collaborate by easily sharing data and their risk reduction strategies, he thinks departments will be able to better and more efficiently mitigate some of the risks in their communities.

He said some of the changes may seem minor — shifts to the flow of information to the community and changes to handouts — but other changes could be larger. Johnson said he believes over time the tool and collaboration between departments could lead to changes in things such as building codes, fire alarm systems and operational changes.

Newport News is preparing to train staff on using the tool. The IT department is building the dashboards. Johnson said he expects the tool to launch for the city some time in the next two months.

“This is going to become a permanent part of the Newport News Fire Department doing community risk reduction,” Johnson said. “It just makes good sense — there’s a great opportunity here for us.”

Jessica Nolte, 757-912-1675, jnolte@dailypress.com