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In 1964, the Civil Rights Act began the transformation of the United States to a tolerant nation by prohibiting employment discrimination because of race, colour, sex, national origin, or religion. Now, after thirty‐six years, what was once an inferno has now been subdued and significantly extinguished. We do find, however, that there are still lingering embers that must be continually monitored to be sure that our country does not sustain any future damage from the rekindling of discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive model of safety culture for the US fire service.

Based upon a modified version of Cooper’s Reciprocal Determinism Model, the research uses two sets of exogenous variables, labeled Safety Management System and Safety Related Behaviors, to explain a dependent variable called Organizational Safety Climate. The model has been used successfully to improve safety performance in other high risk, high performance organizations. Using survey data collected from over 1,000 firefighters in three medium‐sized US municipalities, the theoretical model is tested.

Results from multiple regression analyses provide strong support for the hypothesis that individual perceptions of safety management and safety behavior predict individual perceptions of safety climate, both at the “fire service” organizational level and at the individual department level.

Limitations of the study include a cross‐sectional design, the use of self‐reported perceptions for the variables, and the fact that the three mid‐sized US fire departments from which data were gathered self‐selected to participate in the study.

A practical feature of the theoretical model tested is the ability to create “safety report cards” for each of the 12 dimensions that define the three variables used in the study.

This model holds the promise of reducing firefighter injuries and deaths by identifying managerial and behavioral safety improvement areas within US fire departments.

To the authors’ knowledge, this research represents the first attempt to both identify and test empirically a safety culture model for the US fire service.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership strategies of fire officers used by fire office leaders to manage costs associated with hazardous operations.

The methodology employed in this study was a qualitative method using a case study design. The participants in this research study comprised 13 randomly selected fire officers from fire stations within a major metropolitan area located in the USA who had five or more years hazardous operations experience. In addition to interviews, workplace practices, policies and procedures related to hazardous operations and cost management were analyzed. Limitations of this study include both the sample size, and the geographic area, which impacts the ability to generalize the results of the study.

Four central themes emerged from the study, namely, servant leadership, partnership, accountability and creative staffing, which are crucial strategies to manage costs associated with hazardous operations. The findings of this study further indicate fire officers must distinguish between the most appropriate action for any given situation to achieve the fire department goals and objectives.

Managing cost effective hazardous operations through sound leadership strategies reduced injuries and saved lives, which results in cost savings in fire departmental budgets, labor costs and health care costs, which can further support the redirection of funds to critical areas of fire operations.

The value of identifying leadership strategies related to hazardous operations cost management may reduce injuries, save lives and ensure adequate budget allocations for fire departments. Social implications include innovative leadership strategies, which may enable fire officers to promote positive social change through saving lives of fire fighters and the citizens they serve.

The purpose of this study is to reveal and analyse dominant learning processes in emergency response work from the fire‐fighters' point of view, and how fire‐fighters develop their competence.

This study adopted an explorative approach using participant observation. The objective of this open‐minded approach was to discover how, when and where learning took place.

There are several areas for learning that contribute to fire‐fighters' development of competence: training, exercises, responses to incidents, storytelling, discussions, lectures, courses, introduction of new technology/knowledge and reading of articles/literature. However, learning to act appropriately in emergency situations is mainly a result of the embodiment of skills and knowledge (getting the feel of it, or “getting it in the finger” as the Norwegian idiom puts it), personal experience and interpersonal sharing of stories.

The study concludes that learning amongst fire‐fighters follows a process of legitimate peripheral participation, as well as learning being a personal development for the individual fire‐fighter. A combination of a socio‐cultural approach to learning and an individual cognitive approach is thus needed to fully understand learning processes.

Learning can be improved by actors becoming more reflexive practitioners, where responses are critically evaluated and established knowledge and practice are questioned. Efforts to improve learning amongst fire‐fighters should accordingly include systematic sharing of experiences and development of more challenging exercises which will help to enhance bodily experience of new knowledge.

This study extends current understanding of learning and competence development in emergency work. It presents essential learning activities, in addition to the dominant learning mechanism in personal development. The study clarifies the potential for learning through planned learning processes as opposed to the contribution from informal, ad hoc, socio‐cultural means of learning.

Consequent to an arson fire killing 17 persons in a Hong Kong karaoke in 1997, fire safety provisions in karaokes has raised public concern. Government officers and the services industry have agreed to upgrade fire safety provisions. But before deciding what to do, facilities for the existing karaokes are the subject of a review. A simple fire safety ranking system was proposed in 1999 for existing karaokes. They were grouped on the basis of their fire facilities and management system. The system was criticized for being inapplicable to local industry, as a result of failing to solicit views from the services industry. That system has since been revised. Trial runs in 19 existing karaokes were carried out in 2000. Now, the system is more suited for local use as it is simple. Hence advocates the use of the system to the Hong Kong Fire Authority for assessing fire safety of existing karaokes.

The rapid development of urban areas in Sleman District, Indonesia, has created new challenges for firefighting response services. One of the primary challenges is to identify the optimal locations for new fire stations, to improve service quality and maximize service coverage within the specified time.

This paper proposes a method for precisely calculating travel time that integrates delay time caused by traffic lights, intersections and congestion. The study highlights the importance of precise calculation of travel time in order to provide a more accurate understanding of the service area covered by the fire stations. The proposed method utilizes network analysis in ArcGIS, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and simple additive weighting (SAW) to accurately calculate travel time and to identify the best locations for new fire stations. The identification of new site was based on service safety, service quality, service costs and demographic factors and applied to the Sleman district in Indonesia.

The results showed that the total area covered by old and new fire stations decreased from 61% to 31.8% of the study area when the adjusted default speed scenario was implemented.

The results indicated that the default speed scenario could provide misleading information about the service area, while the adjusted default speed scenario improved service quality and maximized service coverage.

The proposed method provides decision-makers with an effective tool to make informed decisions on optimal locations for new fire stations and thus enhance emergency response and public safety.

This paper aims to evaluate the level of compliance of fire safety with the legal requirements in Malaysia government hospital buildings by evaluating via fire risk management.

Five government hospitals were selected. These five hospitals were selected due to the location of Penang, which is one of the fast-growing states in Malaysia (Salleh, 2019; Ebekozien, 2019). This state is the second most densely populated state after Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, with an average distribution of 1,490 persons per square km. This higher population caused the higher demand on the health-care services by the public (DOSM, 2016). The observation and building audit processes are as described. Hundreds of photos were taken for qualitative analysis, and all fire safety elements were measured for the descriptive analysis for each hospital. The framework of audit elements is created based on the Life Safety Code: NFPA 101 (2018), UBBL 1984: Part VII (Fire Requirements) and Part VIIII (Fire Alarms, Fire Detection, Fire Extinguishment and Fire Fighting Access). The cross-sectional descriptive evaluation is conducted in the case studies building in accordance with Life Safety Code of NFPA, also known as NFPA 101. To conduct the study, the information needed to assess the fire safety status was extracted from the CFSES software based on the NFPA 101 standard and prepared and compiled by the researcher as a checklist. In the next stage, gathered information was analysed using Computerised Fire Safety Evaluation System (CFSES) software. This method was developed based on the NFPA 101 standard and evaluated the fire risk from four dimensions of containment, extinguishment, people movement and general safety. This software gives the risk assessment results in three areas of fire control, exits and general safety. To assess the fire risk of the commercial buildings after entering the background information (height, age, number of stories, etc.) in the software, the software first calculates the score that the building should obtain in the three aspects of fire control, exit routes and general safety (minimum score required).

The utmost zones in the case studies (44.3%) occupied by limited mobility are located at low-rise buildings or at the first floor to third floor of the hospital buildings. Hospitals managements lacked in creating the maximum exit route and egress the occupants to disclosed the building during evacuation, it correlates to the patients' mobility positions strategy to assign their categories that fell on effortless mobilisation. Surveyed hospitals were built with the non-combustible materials, even though four of the case studies were built before 1984. Hospitals were equipped with hazard separations and vertical smoke pores, and in most of the zones, sprinkler system is installed only in the corridors, equipped with communication system and system of communication with fire and relief organisations and has a fire detection and alarm system throughout the building. Results of fire risk assessment on four groups of elements were tested via CFSES revealed from 122 zones of surveyed hospitals; 102 or 84% of zones give the highest failed rate to comply the NFPA 101 requirements in terms of people movement in the building. The high-occupied Penang General Hospital contributed as the highest case study for not complying with the minimum requirements in all dimensions: people movement elements (41 zones), fire containment (31 zones), fire extinguisher (31 zones) and general safety (20). Fire extinguishment (62 zones) recorded the highest numbers of zones that complied with NFPA 101 (2013). The overall results of the fire risk assessment suggested that in terms of the fire control, egress and general safety aspects, the fire risk assessment score was unacceptable (failed) in all hospital buildings studied, and in the three areas mentioned, the general safety, egress/exit routes and fire control were in a worse status in terms of the score obtained in the software. None of the surveyed hospital received the minimum safety score in the three areas mentioned. The involvement of Emergency Response Team is crucial to overcome this egress or fire exit requirement and parameters.

Several limitations exist in this research that cannot be controlled. Firstly, the occupancy rates only determined during peak hour. Accessibility into hospital compound permitted only during daytime. Secondly, the fire safety audits and fire safety risk management in this research are not being conducted by a professional architect or engineer and as a result must be relied on the direct inspection checklist to create valid results. Thirdly, this research has some limitations which need to be noted but does not affect the robustness of the study’s findings. This study focuses only on five selected public hospitals in one state of the northern region of Malaysia and excluded data gathering from all other parts of Malaysia. The perception of hospital operators regarding fire safety issues from different state hospitals may allow comparisons.

The findings of this paper should make a key practical contribution to the body of knowledge. In practice, the proposed framework should expand the knowledge of public hospital fire safety management plan concerning the level of fire safety compliance with the requirements in government hospital buildings and develop a fire safety management plan framework for government hospital buildings.

This paper develops an early framework component related to the occupants’ safety which gives the basis for future research in hospital fire safety settings as it imparts early investigation into the consequence of investigating the phenomenon from the operators’ perspective as an attempt to improve public health-care fire safety performance in hospitals.

This paper has created a few measurement tools that can be applied among public hospital buildings stakeholders to perform the fire safety audit and risk management and rate the performance of Fire Safety Management in public hospitals.

Proper implementation of fire safety management is a key to providing total fire safety. In this paper, a regulatory framework related to fire safety management in buildings in Hong Kong has been reviewed. Current statutory requirements covering both administrative and technical aspects of fire safety management elements are outlined. Responsibilities of different management parties in a typical multiple occupancies commercial building on operating the fire safety measures are discussed. It is observed that only maintenance of active fire protection systems are emphasised at the moment. A more detailed fire safety plan should be formulated with clear legal liability for undertaking management responsibilities.

The purpose of this paper is to implement an activity support system for volunteer fire corps using Web-GIS technology.

In this study, the authors implemented a volunteer fire corps activity support system comprising a dispatch request system, a water sources geographic information system, a fire-vehicle location confirmation system, a route history system and an integrated management system. They implemented this system as a Web application in consideration of responsive design assuming that it is used on mobile terminals.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, the authors conducted a survey of 18 fire corps volunteers who were asked to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness.

In this research work, the authors implemented the volunteer fire corps activity support system using Web-GIS technology. The authors conducted a questionnaire survey of the volunteer fire corps activity support system, asking 18 fire corps volunteers to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness. The results of the survey indicate an overwhelming positive response to the volunteer fire corps activity support system for all five measures.

The purpose of this research is to review literature about the performance assessment (PA) in urban fire departments (FDs) to gain state-of-the-art of the fire departments' performance assessment (FDPA) and identify its most applied methods and indicators.

A five-stage structured literature review (SLR) is conducted to review the FDPA-related studies; then, the statistical analysis is applied to reveal more information from the extracted data and design a general framework for FDPA.

The systematic literature review resulted in 336 independent variables for FDPA and finding the data envelopment analysis (DEA) as the most applied FDPA method among the mathematical and statistical models in the reviewed papers. By using analysis outcomes, a general conceptual framework for FDPA is proposed.

The reviewed studies were limited to assessments at the strategic level and urban fire protection services.

The results of this research can support fire protection service managers, decision-makers, PA researchers and academicians to have a better understanding of FDPA and state-of-the-art in this field.

A considerable number of studies have been done about the FDPA to provide methods to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of FDs. Although there are reviews about PA in fire service areas, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been done about FDPA.