Firefighter Safety Culture

Safety culture in the fire and emergency service

What a safety culture is, and what it asks of a fire department

This site collects plain reading on the safety-culture work the American fire service has been doing since the early 2000s: the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation's 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives, the National Safety Culture Change Initiative published by the U.S. Fire Administration and the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the fatality data those efforts are measured against.

Reading

Explainer

What safety culture actually means on the fireground

"Safety culture" gets used loosely in the fire service. The source documents are specific. This article walks through what the term means, where it came from, what the 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives say, and which behaviors the USFA and IAFC study says need to change.

Read the article

Where the primary material lives

  • nfff / everyone goes home

    Everyone Goes Home

    The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation program that produced the 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives at the 2004 Firefighter Life Safety Summit, plus the white paper series written on each one. The everyonegoeshome.com address now forwards to the Foundation's site at firehero.org.

  • usfa.fema.gov

    National Safety Culture Change Initiative (FA-342)

    The April 2015 report developed by the IAFC through a partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration. It is the study this site was originally built to carry, and it is still the clearest single statement of the problem.

  • usfa.fema.gov

    USFA firefighter fatality reporting

    Annual reports and running notifications of on-duty firefighter fatalities, published since 1986. The stated objective is to identify and analyze every on-duty fatality so the causes are understood and can be prevented.

  • iafc.org

    NSCCI educational plan

    The educational outline built on top of the NSCCI report by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, for departments that want to teach the material rather than only read it.

Archive

The earlier version of this site, built around the National Safety Culture Change Initiative project, is preserved rather than deleted. Its pages and its news posts remain at their original addresses.