If you have followed my writings about our onduty deaths you would know that while I appreciate the work that goes into the process of defining and recording our fatalities, I constantly encourage you to read beyond the beige report we are given each year. The problem that comes up is how do we determine what deaths we have and where they lead us in the evolution of our fatalities? How do you as a fireman classify these as well as the areas of greatest risk? I know that answer is going to sound like a conflict of interest or moral superiority debate but if we remove the three star rating system and just look at the data, without the benefit of a doubt, for every fatality we can take away is a loss of 21 firefighters. If we only count suicides we are doing firefighters a favor.

If we include full scale force injuries we are neglecting the large majority of our fatalities. I know that may seem like a conflict of interest since we are all aware of the deaths involving fireground suicide but if we remove these from our calculations, the fire service falls even lower. Another aspect of this data that supports the point that fatality is a compartment of work and not a victimless crime is the fact that in 2014 only 5 deaths involved a change in fireground activity.

Thats extremely low when compared to previous years and fairly constant in 66 of the past 67 years. This is also reflected in the other data in this category, the number of days firefighters spend inside burning structures.

Disclaimer: The preceding content was generated by an AI algorithm, trained on millions of points of data scoured from the web. It is constantly updating itself, but while some of the information presented in this article may be true, none of the facts have been verified.