What is the risk to firefighters at structural fires? If you estimate your exposure, you should be able to answer that. Every year the American fire service experiences over 100 onduty deaths and 250 in firefighterassociated structures. Firefighters die every year on the fireground, directly involved in fighting fire and the second due engine company on each death is also involved in fighting fire.
The risk to firefighters at structural fires ranges from very low to very high. Risk is assessed on a yearly basis and adjusts for time of year. The purpose of this is to identify the risk factors for firefighters to become injured and, if they are not already injured, to modify their training to lessen the risk.
The Risk Based Injury Compensation program, ORIG, was developed by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and is named for a deceased firefighter who became ill after working at a structure fire. ORIG provides compensation, over a fiveyear period, to fire departments and counties for firefighters who were injured in structure fires, in an amount determined by the fire department, in exchange for participating in the fire department drills and other physical activity. The first phase of ORIG is to identify the nature of the fatal injury and, where appropriate, to begin the compensatory process. In the second phase, firefighters are identified in a nominating vote by a nominating committee, which in turn identifies firefighters whose onduty deaths are in the same occupational category as the victim, and whose injury occurred while participating in the fire department drills or other physical activity.
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.
