Firefighter Injury and Death Symposium Reports

A gathering of reports from the Safety and Health Committee to help inform and educate the Fire Service to be safer and healthier.

Introduction by John Granito Ed.D., Symposium Coordinator

It seems accurate to say that the widespread efforts to reduce line-of-duty firefighter deaths (LODD) and injuries have the strongest unified support the American fire service has ever experienced. Where we saw some disagreement over the creation of NFPA standards 1500 and 1710 in earlier years, we now have very strong, universal fire service concern over the high annual cost in firefighter lives and budgets. Every fire service organization I know of is focusing attention on safer operations. Unfortunately, LODD statistics aren’t improving despite individual efforts and the efforts of thousands of departments of all types and sizes that participate in the safety oriented programs which have been operating for several years.
Four years have now passed since the National Firefighter Life Safety Summit and its regional meetings designed the national LODD reduction strategy and the “Everyone Goes Home” theme. Last year, 2007, the nation was impacted by 118 line-of-duty firefighter deaths. Many persons began to judge that we need to identify additional, new concepts about overall safety, leadership and supervision, looking once more at such areas as aggressive interior attack, general suppression tactics, “organizational culture”, firefighter wellness, and vehicle operations.
Yet fire-rescue departments still need to respond to emergencies, conduct search and rescue operations, save lives, and protect and preserve property, so the very nature of the job must be taken into consideration. PERI has sponsored an annual fire service Virtual Symposium for the past several years, focusing on various aspects of risk reduction, and now is adding this effort toward reducing firefighter LODD and injury statistics.

The following 21 links are for 21 different reports.

S908-D1-Compton.pdf
S908-D1-Intro-Granito.pdf
S908-D2-Brunacini.pdf
S908-D2-Pessemier.pdf
S908-D3-Cole.pdf
S908-D3-Klaene.pdf
S908-D4-Halton.pdf
S908-D4-Thorne.pdf
S908-D5-Krueger.pdf
S908-D5-Stein.pdf
S908-D6-Merrill.pdf
S908-D7-Jones.pdf
S908-D7-Lombardo.pdf
S908-D7-Svensson.pdf
S908-D8-AP.pdf
S908-D8-Crawford.pdf
S908-D8-Schulman.pdf
S908-D9-Hales.pdf
S908-D9-Neal.pdf
S908-D10-Eisner.pdf
S908-D10-Granito.pdf